Lucy - a nonfiction piece

           “I still don’t feel it.” Thirty minutes in, it was his first time and he was a jittery, quickly-turning-pale mess of skin and bones and his heart seemed a little too anxious to let anyone hear its thump-thump-thump in the key of nervousness#. I put my hand over his chest and his pulse felt like fresh bricks—stiff and thick—quickly ricocheting against his insides in a violent sort of manner.

            “Yes you do and that’s how Lucy says hello,” I said, nonchalantly and ready for the night to begin, when I noticed it was 1AM! Holy shit, we’ll be up all night. I quickly let go of any worries, though, because that night was for him. I only felt the pounding heart punches too, but soon enough we’d start to feel. It was going to be difficult though because he wouldn’t stop psyching himself out – worrying about any twitches or blurred lines being purely placebo.

            “Maybe so but I doubt this is it.” If he’d stop being so obnoxious and just let himself ease into it, he’d actually enjoy tonight.

            “Well, we’ll see.” And with that, I really let it all go. Instead, I thought of us and how even at his most annoying (which really isn’t very annoying at all now that I think of it), I adore him wholeheartedly. I thought of how over the past… twelve days.

It was a mere twelve days into our relationship—not even two weeks in. Dear god we’re moving fast. Only a few days earlier, we’d spilled the big ‘L’ word, which made my teeth chatter, spin hunch, eyes dry, skin turn to rough scars of acupuncture, stippled and stiff, because the last time I’d said “love” to a guy was eight months prior right before said guy told me he no longer wanted to use such a word with me. So now it felt right but weird; it made our eyes twitch and skin crawl but we said it anyway ‘cause we were sure that we meant it. This is something real, but I guess real is relative. Never before, however, had he quite literally seen his skin crawl, but about an hour into our “vacation,” he started to see movement.

            The way that Lucy makes walls breathe and the air twitch and your skin move, the way she introduces you to her fun-house ride of distortion mirrors and pretty lights is something we call wonky. It starts off slow and this time was no different, evidently enough by his earlier impatience and anxiousness to “see shit” as he so eloquently put. Well we certainly “saw shit.” His wide-eyed gazes, abrupt and sharp double takes, and increasingly oblivious tactile attention to his hair, face and hands made me smile. I remembered my first time and my indistinguishably similar initial reactions and I realized what it took was vulnerability. My first time with Lucy, I was completely vulnerable, already in tears before I met her but not from sadness. I’d told him off the bat that Lucy’s friendship was different to everyone, but she kept one aspect in tact from friend to friend and that was her letting moving objects have seemingly magical ways of leaving outlines of themselves behind to follow in blue, rose, green, beautiful.

            We weren’t (and we still aren’t) sure why things that moved left pieces of themselves behind in their initial places. We call these after-images “tracers.” Why tracers? I always think about that when Lucy is around. This time was no different. These… things more so chase or trail after the original object or image. So why not call them chasers? Why not trailers? I mean, I suppose they’re not alcoholic follow-ups or mobile metal homes, so tracers will just have to do until we come up with something more fitting.

            “I think I’m seeing tracers! My hand! It’s going hand, hand, hand, hand, hand.” He didn’t even need to say that much for me to know what he was going through. His hand waving vigorously in front of his face and his jaw, dropped and rigor mortis-esque, gave hints without need for words, but there we were regardless, chatting away.

            “I told you you’d see them!”

            “But this was so much more calm than I’d expected.” He was right. Hype about Lucy makes most people think that she forces you into intensity quickly.

            “I know. You’re easing into it. So just relax and let it happen. Have fun.” So he did. And I did. And we did. We had fun watching each other and ourselves and the floor as it rippled like water after rocks falling in, and the popcorn ceilings really popping and we could almost hear it.

            A couple of hours in, probably, time began to trip up on itself – hour hand growing and shrinking, minute hand fast slow fast slow stop fast slow. Walls wavered, melted. Crawling carpets kept us kicking, uncomfortably twitching, restlessly reaching to touch things not there—rug bugs, creatures creeping counterclockwise. Three, four hours maybe and we danced dizzily around the saffron-stained setting, whispering and watching paintings dance, sending themselves into third, fourth-dimension strokes, brush marks convulsing. Blunt synths sterilized stern air, forced us to fold into each other, arms crooked and locked in pretzel-twist turns, legs languidly leaning against one another.

            Without a word, he turned on a newer song of his, one that I loved from the second I heard it but this time was far different. Chimes resonated and sat in front of us in the air, drums felt thick and encompassing. It kicked us violently, forced itself tightly around us and in an instant, he cut the noise and heavy stage curtains of silence fell. Almost instantaneously, we quietly led one another to the bathroom, to the mirror, tricky and taunting. We watched shaped lights plant themselves all over our faces and we cackled uncontrollably, but we tried not to wake our neighbors. We saw bugs in the tiles, little red dots in circular symmetrical slow-paced formations. Synchronized crawlers, everywhere we looked. I’d never noticed them before but they were an interesting addition to the already-fantastic and ineffable night. We squealed and screamed and were squeamish to the little red dots so after what was probably an hour, we left the cramped bathroom, reluctantly abandoning our reflections that didn’t match our real faces and we hydrated because oddly enough a high heart beat makes you thirstier than usual. And orange juice was a hair shy of what felt like satisfying an addiction.

            As with everything else that night, though, we had to play with and use the refreshment for things other than its sole purpose. We tried blowing bubbles with it, we poured it on countertops and finger-painted in it and all too soon did a few friends drop by and it seemed as if they were hanging with Lucy themselves. They were loud, abrasive, invasive, uneasy. Immediately, we clammed up, cleaned up, and moseyed back to the living room where we hoped to find serenity. But to no surprise, they all joined us, sat around us, filled the space and suffocated the air that was a mere moment before beautiful and open, welcoming. Clamor cluttered our atmosphere and with that, we feared our night was ruined. To our avail, however, three at that point unrecognizable disruptive masses simply left. And again, silence fell. So we focused.

We focused on the aesthetics and became ascetic-like, still in thought and body, though quickly we began to tremble and twitch because Lucy wouldn’t let us be still for too long so we wavered back and forth, heavily.

            But we were unwavering. We were clear with one another and that’s something we’d both so fiercely searched for within ourselves. And we finally found it. The thought so clearly rung in my skull, ricocheting and evidently making some racket because the next thing I knew, he thought it too.

            “Clarity,” he announced concretely to the world, population two that we’d built for ourselves, as if we’d had the silent back-and-forth before. With that one word, we stretched, smiled, sat, sunk into each other, silently stealing the night. Quickly though, he took my hand, guided me gently through a half-open screen door to a purple pink orange sky where the sun decided to paint warm reflections on the 6:30am clouds that we weren’t sure were real in their sometimes-geometric, other-times-floral designed movements. We morning-dreamed at the air around us as patterns rippled, shook, shivered rapidly reminding us that real is relative.

            I felt a warm hand glide over mine, touches trembling. We turned together, stared together, laughed together as we watched fractals form rivers and melted our faces.

            “I love you,” he whispered, sincerely.

           

            “I feel it too now.”

            This is real.