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Underneath flesh, drew the scratching beneath. The screaming, vying sensor beneath the overhead layer, when all things of semblance and mundane ingenuity melted into a fine syrup. It was the bustling of blood beneath, soothed still, placid, all from what could capture it in remarkable captivation. Metal could kill the ache, cause the ache, be everything-and-nothing, like a ringing in the consequential quiet.
Maybe hours had driven past, on highways and riveted streams, chugging and chafing along the edges of borders. Maybe it'd been minutes, slow enough to spot, quick enough to always outrun the revel. It lay unknown, in an undressed bed, on a skeletal fixture without coating, on a wick stripped of its wax—the direction of deposition was a spiritual desire one could no longer nail, not when the brain was flaccid and withering static. It just buzzed, like the edges of fingertips, like the skin around the contusion, buzzing-throbbing in a succession too exasperated to name.
The cold air felt like blithe teeth—warmth to one who'd grown ineffably invernal, although another scar to bear nonetheless. It was torn, barely noticeable, war against power. Steel was frigid to the touch, tactile ability that had not yet been extended, for it lived inside without doubt. Corroded, the tang festered, materialized into comfort. Its sharp edges were saccharine, its bitter scrape ecstatic, because the impression was enough to compel him to do it again in repetitious mindlessness.
Sat against the hard wood, the deprivation imbued with overwhelmed felicity seemed to slickly line the chime of guilt. That was an afterthought, one that rarely existed in the subhuman realm sobriety. It was only able to be drowned and snuffed at the cherry, even more decadently so, when that junk was already rushing. When the thrum of sound bursted his seams awry, that was when there was too much noise to astutely hearken to logic. When time was obelisk, when breath was ascetic, when hunch was stone, it was over. Qualms died the moment that he'd dug his needle-nail through.
The eve was dead, formulated mirror strewn on the floor, background fuzz that ran through internal noise like a taut blink. The cerebral concrete was what kept his languid limbs a sandbag, the late of the hour unattainable, just motivated by the sublime peeking inklings of moon that shared itself with crystal-recessed pupil. Shadows cast against the interior, the silver, slender slivers through the lines of exposed blind. Layne traced his gaze upon the ever-changing malleability, the way it contorted and shriveled around the numb, clinical, wraith-like night.
Maybe the solitude was exactly what had him so fixated on the only present alteration, the feeling of dynamic; how the breeze rattled the outside, how the light fluctuated against surrounding lush, how the beam refracted against mizzled water droplets of rainfall against the glass. Loneliness, what he incessantly mused upon in scattershots of poetry, embodied in yet another rigid scratch of flurried atonality. To fixate was to fix the sickness, to remedy it with something to distract from it. Shift it. Like plates, words, like sands. Shift it.
So, light it'd be, for nothing else could cradle the crash down. It wasn't what he typically chose to use during all other liquidized condescension, but it required no effort. His eyes, barely visually interested in anything meaningful, could not adhere to anything of use. Not the screen, not the page, not the paintbrush. The sanctity stifled him. Shifted. Nevertheless, there was pleasure in such degradation, in rendering life to be futile, when gashes and healing wounds morphed into one in the same. There was an introspection in how far he could go, what limit he could insert that spindle-legged sentience into and not have to face the rejection metamorphosing as hell.
He didn't know when exactly he'd begun to inch towards the inconstant fixture of picturesque soreness, he simply recognized it once his skin was against the flickers of luminescence, rendering the majority of himself shadow, too. It was a drowsy form of inconstant wave, the way his ample conscience obsessively spiraled around possibilities of such futility. Yet, it was all that he could muster to eye, the way that the small slit of lucid essence hit the pale of his skin in a shine unprecedented among the harrowing murk.
It was the way that he could see clearly, now, the specks of past relation, only dampened against the flesh, rather than fully formulated in its ascension to mediocre expectation. The places he’d last chosen, his past targets. To pry at what was there, get a flash of ecstasy upon a thrilling consummation of punctured blue, it was routine, habit, something that could easily rush away all bland dryness. Everything became an excuse, every moment articulated within his flashing eyelet, it came as a forefronting tease—that the syringe could happily whisk away the moments of crackling desertion.
Evenings spent in solitude, in shivering, quivering loneliness, it only gave Layne the most cathartic justification to break the cycle more consistently into himself. He countered the observation of what could be pleasantly done while sensibly attuned. Instead, starkly stumbling upon the realization that all pleasure seemingly derived from the moments when he was already standing in the bleeding spotlight of nude drug. Stimulation crumbled lone misery, which made that trip so much more worthy of his attention.
There were obvious denotations to which he’d grown tolerant to. The way those lines of indigo root recessed deeper than against the thin gaunt, the way the licentious flame of eager reaction had dampened over time, the way that nothing could possibly evoke euphoric elation to such a degree any longer. There was a juvenile essence of ache that accompanied the siren-called swooning, narcotics that kissed the stab gently, in such a sense that left one hooked after the few misdemeaned slights of impotence. He would let it kiss him, slow enough to melt time itself, blundering and meshing so machine-like, in rows of toiled dragging.
Those little tracking spots were simply evidence of how much of a willing participant he was to it. How he could tread the sweetened tip of steel against the softness of his forearm, let it lightly whisper and accompany him in the moments when no other soul could physically vibrate those cloying things down into the recesses of his nerve endings. Nothing could make him pulse the way that the astonishing flicker of fortune could, when he slipped the angle, shifted his blood against the nectar of fixation. Jubilation, it was, to be enamored and exacted by the connection that became priority.
To bask in the visual of moonbeam exposure against what was underground, it was an enigma that often never received the chance to be manifested. The adorning flecks, like deep and potent spilled wine, often stayed in the suffocation of a sleeve. It was all to deafen the possibility of being criticized for the shameful, sickening way that he so often willingly offered himself to the familiar freezer-burn that was bestowed upon him. Laid bare against the ground, there was no disconsolate, wrying stare of infinity now letting him stumble in psychic reflection. The shimmering, unwavering placement of the moon, in that very glimpse, it wouldn’t judge the way that he let the opioid falter his battered sense. It wouldn’t scorningly spit his way, utter his name in linen and charcoal, berate the way that he so often let his days be consumed.
It would set him alight, instead. For, when in loneliness, starshine gave the urge more power. He could stare for hours at the kiss-mark-track-marks trailing down, let a misplaced sensation twirl and uncomfortably settle within his stomach. He couldn't quite nail what evocation came from his hushed consolations.
Some days, they crawled and scraped at him. Like insects, haunting his barren state, assaulting and intoxicating him with a maiming punch of bitterness. He could feel the way that the underfed nips looked more like bruises, sigils that screamed afar, propagating the fact that he had no self-control, no restraint. The points he uncovered the oscillating indentations, sobriety venomously seemed to gnaw at the fact that such obvious significance was a fault of his own. Other days, as tonight, they were the misunderstood predecessor of something so strikingly abstract, the smears he could harbor and gaze tenderly upon the light of nature. For, he could not seem to encapsulate the appetite to let them fade for long.
Yet, despite the obscured beauty he saw against his body, one that consistently emerged as triumphantly gasped and gritted upon by the morphing faces who’d viewed the devoted massacre, he longed for more. Yearning for someone to see the affections and depressions that he’d hissed into the bloodstream, the romantic persuasion the needle could often settle into him, for someone to see what spurred it.
The contrast surrounding the room, it had grown more noticeable to Layne, in the gaps of space that his eyes had heavily focused upon (even in their unabashedly slurring form.) The way that reflection and refraction rendered the space to encompass a vapid, paradigmatic disorder of twilight, all except for the allotted bars of emission against the surfaces of the area. It was almost in some wicked, convoluted indication of pareidolia, where the darkness and light seemed to entangle within itself and render that eerie unease suddenly at the forefront of his mentality.
It felt like a taunt. Whatever was left of his functional sensibilities, they were manipulating the physical lack of mortality present, attempting to cajole him into a facetious tension. Then, it became a plucking, arrhythmic cacophony of confusion, the sound of gears that stopped and started in stark harmonic—it became what he couldn’t possibly shift the fixation aside from—instead of being the comforting turmoil that he could envelop himself within, it was the lack of breath beside him, or of repositioning, or of noise.
Not the noise inside, no. Not the sounds coming out of his mouth that he couldn’t define as fact or delirious accentuation, but pure, unbridled noise. Music. That was what he needed, music. Not the formulating transitions of features that came from the light and shadow against his wall, not the red plucks against skin that’d grown tired, not the hunger that he held for stimulation, not-not-not.
There was a time, earlier, beyond the hours-minutes-seconds ago, when there was soft breeze that covered him. When he had his thumb against the textured pad of the plunger, the cold innards of the clear capsule perfectly inserted within the gaps of his fingers, the fondling nails of the needle—the second that he’d jutted inside, applied the pressure against the scored circle, it was auspicious once again. Life was brighter, then, even in the purging black. Whilst now, he could no longer locate the titillation of cold rush against his human warmth, the shiver that settled so ardently. Instead, it was all null once again, just as he’d felt prior to the effort.
It was null in a more discomforting intimation, however. It didn’t settle like thirst or craving as it would had he been sober, instead swaying itself regrettably into a more defining notion of sorrow. Virtually unheard of, not when this route of blithe excellence had been successful in grasping him against the luminosity that often went unseen time and time again. The metal, without sentience, could only entertain his interest for long, the hardwood was only a crutch to use when rendered incapable.
In haze, it seemed to crumble in his hands, the stability he swore kept him at bay. For once, it seemed that paranoia beguiled him into a state of diluted fright, the way that every conception of disdain came swallowing perturbingly, all in gusts and snaps of quickening pace. It was too difficult to pinpoint in such a state, the fact that he was metrically finding ways to kindle dissatisfaction in the dope that was supposed to save. Perhaps it was all just an afterthought of limit, a saturation that twinged him sickened by himself. It left the ringing line of dead-noise unacknowledged, to which reimbursed him with the need of contact.
There was a solitary abutment in the vast circumstance, the prospect of residence. Where the flame settled deep inside, ashed away the cramping in smoked hues of gray, spiraled the violence into visceral vivaciousness. And, while the stabbing of the alloy—where cool blue was strewn into tatter—sometimes, it could successfully fix the preliminary complications of suffering. Only to meet the tired accentuation that the complications veered in whirlwind by obtuse extremity in exchange. It shifted, simmered, hurled into oblivion. Never ineffable stability, never the absolute savior, never to be depended on, despite the dependency he extended nonetheless.
He was gullible to take it; to swoon over affections in the pretense of medication. But, Layne simply didn't care. It could strip him of the dignity he carried in glass, and he would find a way to excuse it once again, shove it down and take the absolution. For, now he was the fragile sucker of the vying hand, to which all issue drawn was imperative in blood.
Maybe, truly, what he needed now, in the state of sluggish grievance, was for company to buzz in synchrony with his own pitch. The noise unraveled the very inner workings of his head, split apart the bone and rearranged the pieces in disarray, logic perished on tied tongues and wavered commitments. The least he could do was try to make it blend, interplay and splat its synthetic shades across the plain. Complement the being, a gust of breeze on bordering humidity.
And, now against the moonlight, shining in brittle snaps and rendering the slew of drug-daze an unnecessary catastrophe, the welling sensation weighed heavily within the confines of skin. A kiss was weightless, all to be stumbled against the truthful burden to be the happenstance. Desire and sorrow swelled into a tolling brew of guilt, an allegiant alleviation that settled. Guilt, this was. A wanton wanting for nothing more than life to settle in the space where the moonbeams so desperately cast themselves, a spotlight in itself, of one's own toiled undoing.
It almost felt to be reverberation, the way that the own sentiment seemed to rattle his stupefied processors into a soundscape not yet tread. All of his noise devolved, rocked into itself in cacophonic, egregious segmentations, surrealistically unbeknownst to him. Sprawling down from the audacious high never sweetened, never became a familiarity to him. Even when he let his head fall back, his breathing slowing to a cadavers pace, it never seemed to redirect the stirring of blood that rushed around every fiber.
He could bite his lip, let the glowing grin of a gravitational peak overpower his brain, a sight only bored by the darkness. He could ride, ride, rise up into what cracked and penetrated a momentary drag of heaven, just to descend soon after. It'd never be enough, though. Never, ever satiated. Not satisfied. Just famished for whatever else he could grasp in his hands—hands that shook, careless in spilling all remnants of control residually garnered.
And, yet, when he suddenly had approached this supposed christening, it was only sunken by the way that the shadows spun. Killed by the way the space felt like a drifting vacuum, devoid and devouring all life that lay. Including him. The paranoia bit at him in stretched gnaws, more starved than he had ever seemingly felt for the temporary slice of life that would become the succulent parasite. It usurped the light, airless cusp.
It allowed whatever resided leftover in his senses to decipher, or, attempt to. Find the source, deter it from becoming the proprietary thought of this. ‘Shift it,’ he supposed. Everything, lately, had become the patterned tapping, rearranging, compartmentalizing to dwindling in recollection. Every source had a method to stifle it, and if it required denial, he'd do it. Moreso, if it required another pump of that halcyon into his veins, so be it.
His figure, in a broken impartiality, began to slump, all vices becoming furthermore weary. It overspent what was possible in nature, it ruined his functionality in a traditional fashion, the metal corroded whatever it could touch impertinently. And, maybe when he could focus less on staring at the surroundings that'd begun to suffocate him, that was when the epiphany began to rocket through. The sound became more than just a simple inconvenience, it'd become what was the experience. There-not-there, in silence captivated by all those sobered and constrained.
Layne supposed that it finally began to register once he began to allow that consuming, gripping of wake to comprise the barren energy being radiated. That he'd been paranoid over wanting the gift of accompanying presence, that the mutilated associations he'd been unnecessarily making were all in efforts to fix himself a recognizable issue.
It clicked in a sudden bullet hole, then. Exactly what he wanted, who he wanted. In a merciless attempt at regaining control over fixation, he attempted to juxtapose that, too. All to avails that rendered him feeble. He couldn't command that hunger. The way that the thoughts seemed to manifest in sparse layers of melodic chimes, rather than the cocksure sporadic nothingness he'd internalized his own beliefs to be, that was a natural settlement.
He almost swore that he'd spoken aloud, right through the fog that was currently the strain within—said something of name, of note—even in its futile nature regarding the current asphyxiated circumstance. There was a fervency in the fact that he could not simply shake the behavior out of that echoing chamber, dissolving by the minute as both the fallout and sleaziness approached his subconscious by a superfluous degree. It sat, festered, lingering in raw heat; because he knew. He couldn't avoid, couldn't change, or shift, or shake it out, like intrinsic hell, the bell toiled, he fucking knew.
Right at the striking velocity he expected, he was lured by the prospect, the utterance that he took for granted in dabbled misrememberings. The way he could still picture all things fondly in the palm of his hand, slipping through his fingers, yet still what he clawed to keep as a memento. He could see in the sweet shine of light, put a face to the name, which oftentimes automatically came to his insight in more ferocious cycles than he'd ever admit.
There was shame in such a common trepidation, crawling down his spine in rusted nails, poking and prodding at his stability, at whatever nerves cascaded down the bone to keep him functioning. It was a thrumming, blown-out speakerbox that whirred and whirled tumultuously; whispering in sacred bouts of nauseating clarity, Jerry. It came and shot through his head, napalm and fragmented sparks inside the space not occupied, stinging him with the inlaid careening.
And, Layne attempted to pour it out. When miserably sober, when deranged beyond repair in hours unspoken, he wrote. Stripped himself bare, metaphorically then, in comparison to his current literal status. He was the nail, he was the hand, he wrote of every winkled naught, shimmers of things he dared to understand. On tangents, on sidetracked-misspelled-shit-shows, over and over, he begged his psyche to figure out where it derived from.
Each instance that which it appeared, it came as surefire inferno. It never chose to let up, never stopped entangling and winding through in backlit trodden passages, where all that came was a wanderlust for more. No matter how much desolation Layne compelled himself into, Jerry somehow arrived. And, while it wasn't always a physical plea outside of the door, it'd always be a straight-through pipeline inside of Layne's skull. Rushing and throttling, in a meeting impromptu yet inconsiderately constant. It felt as though the intoxication only let the thoughts consume the shell of himself, when nearly particles, deliverance came and jostled all perspective.
There was a sentiment made to curb and correct in strides of lengthy subject.
So, then it came, scanning the room. This soulless, fractured regiment of a man who'd lost his motivation to coexist—to hopefully rock the intrusion outside of his body, to scream it out in northern slides in hopes of receding from it southbound. There was nothing more to it, shun it out with what bitterly reserved scorn he had residually bore. Everything was an outline, phantasmal in its brevity, the way that darkness soured and swallowed. At times, he wished the wretchéd speculations would, too, desist with the flooding black. It never seemed to work, always allowing the rampancy to bleakly line itself around the acid instead. Like the evening only seemed to birth the stakes in limp directions.
Eyes darted lightly, despite their heavy-lidded status, (Layne was certain he’d find it more comically ironic, had he not been thought-consumed by such perturbing turmoil,) scanning in monotony. It grew to be only moments afterward in which he found no interest in the pointless method of extermination. Each blink made the time feel as though it were passing more fluidly, even if it only happened to be instances of relaxation evoked from shorter flashes.
The brightness peeking through the blinds, now in a pragmatic snide, was all that could manage to wipe the worn exhaustion from his face. It simply restarted the cycle onceover, once more. There was only one other thing that he could conclude to do, as much as he attempted to sidetrack himself in cold cases of ‘nevermind.’ Which, happened to be allowing the reign to roam. Preoccupy the heinous delicacies that he’d rendered unexplainable time and time again, and pray that he could possibly swallow the fault down in a swig, once the sunshine hit his eyes the proceeding morning.
It seemingly rushed, lynched his body like a subsequent pseudo-high, the moment that he’d began to let himself cease the pleasantries of preoccupation. He was back to letting his head cradle itself in looser fidgeting, back to letting himself stay motionless without a constant, impending, cataclysmic fate to beguile him thereafter. His innards never seemed to settle, never seemed to crucify ache and welcome the lush tenderness of mechanic relief the way that he typically could upon a further injection. However, this was not an articulated waste, no bliss exuded from the needle, he was too tired to bear the strain of movement by now.
It came in vivid flashes, spurts of dreamlike landscapes. As disjointed as the notations came, it seemed to warp and vortex around itself until the vision was linear. The way that he could recall the sight always to his left, the unabashed way the music seemed to course right through—cutting, diverting, splitting—the dank of basements and warped touring methods seemed to return so easily in memoriam of what once was. The juvenile sense of joviality elicited from experience, the way that every night ended with strums of half-pressed chords, the way each laugh he earned out was more of a chiming chide. All of it, like breathing in the scent of a wayward man for the first time again, it returned at once.
It always did.
There was a fear to give the besottedness a name. To outright admit, even in the confines of thought, that it was Jerry. Always Jerry. Layne could never define the penetrating, intrusive ways that the emissions came, never could connotate them to someone else. For infinite strides, he’d attempt to force it out, but the arrival was never the earnest visualization that only one seemed to accurately exude.
He could inhale it, take it, use it as a lifeline. Some nights, the guilt refused to consume him until it eventually struck him in sobriety. Like hearing of drunken misdeeds done, it occurred to Layne that this behavior was abnormal. The ponderings only grew in disorder once he’d repressed it in extensive detail, a throbbing heart shoving the notions deeper down his body until he was filled with it, with the fact that he could no longer deny it. Breathing was the only method of survival dependent, and, even as his inhalations slowed, and slowed, and dove down into concerning territory, Jerry came into his system all the same.
Some days, Layne wondered if the plaguing, sickly injections were what kept him upright. If a needle was what it took to help him breathe in with passion, if that was the oxygen tube that could keep his body upright. He praised the needle, his source of timeless existence. He grinned at the way it seemed to allow him color, allow him exhilaration, allow him pleasure that could never truly be succeeded by much else. Life without the steel could only keep him upright for so long, for he relished in the way that it caressed him by the body, sweltering his features in the frigid night.
He relished in the fantasy, too, that the softness slid up against his forearm. The feeling of metal-skin against flesh, the way the hiss left a reminder of the time well spent, it was love.
Though, when the time had buried itself in a moat of isolation, when the moonlight was the only thing letting him now squint at those track marks—the thought manifested in a variable uncharted. The lips against him, pressing in sweet marks, the bliss that made his body ignite with something oh-so venerated. Instead of his thumb pressed against the plunger of the syringe, it was light against a shoulder, or slightly dug into a head of blond hair. The metal was tepid against his body, now, in such an ideation, gasps of breath instead of the quiet pushing of routine.
The way, that maybe, he’d eye the needle abstrusely close, coveting to feel its pleasure from angles he knew could not strike a vein throughout, and instead of being met by the bijou hole that beheld his next fix—it was a shit-eating grin, a muttered ‘You know that I needed this,’ a kiss that didn’t need a blood vessel to reveal evidence of the matter. The way that they could ring, and harmonize so close, in mirrored paintings of affections. Body to body, to mind, for, he didn’t mind.
The bite only pleased a section, a mere figment of his body, when the pinch and jut became the forefront of monopoly. The object could slither its sweetness inside, but all it could reflect visually was an obsession one untainted could not understand. It was a pious connection, the way the tar could root itself in and rot it all, intimacy from the internal eternal. The illusion nearly struck Layne, the fact that it was all the same, all the things he craved could convolute and disperse into conceptual variety. The way that the fragile nip of sanctity could consume him by the body, calloused hands on more than just a crevice untouched. He could imagine the way the dragging sensation overrode all bounds, how there were many more locations upon his form that could get him high.
It was a shot within, like a sepulchre of chagrin, that what his senses demanded of him was the man who’d drive him in embers. To feel his breath against his neck, to hear the way he’d compliment that abhorrent ringing with his own hollow sounds, to be against him once again, with contact completely overwhelming him. The dread of something so vexing only bled within his skull.
It ran through, limpid and harrowing, ice to combat the solace he’d taken in the concept of wandering. Letting it run, wild like river, with exalted fervor that only seemed to retract all attempts of order once allowed to have an untamed quality. It practically made him perk up in physical disbelief. As sloth as he’d become in such due time, the severity of the sudden disgust that rose within him was something he could not properly adhere to without cathartic exertion. It shifted, slithered, morphed into vile atrocities that doomed his porous position—the fact that it was both unattainable and revolting.
Certainly, the lone aspects of these slurries had fizzled into a deconstructed vehemence. That was the justification. Even if the sudden stirring within him claimed otherwise, Layne began to reconsider complete lack of exertion henceforth. What typically seemed to silence his jabbering, seismic internalizations of similar subject matter, especially when nothing else, had easily deserted him.
Even with the oblivion staring back at him, the knowledge that this didn't matter, that nothing truly quite mattered, the acceptance of the situation seemed to grind into indiscernible astonishment despite it. The rudimentary descendant of his own degeneracy, shooting through his blood in the opposition to his devotion, like self-reproach only depleted the residual nirvana as it all seemed to topple and cascade from the initial direction. Fading went the sensation, as he slowly seemed to rise in lithe fumbling, still affected, although not dominated by impairment.
Rolling down and up the bone, in chilling shivers, the lovely fleeting-floating feeling was no longer of utmost importance. The cold hit more prominently, unpredictable, as the chill seemed to overtake the space in the instant that darkened posture had been amended from slump. Layne, conflicted, stood in the stale stake of indecision, languidly maneuvering the meager space in hopes of acquiring a stance. However, that was not how he operated, force never did him well, not when every choice that dictated him was in the effort of statement. The way the abasement ate at him, it was unprecedented, unexpected; just as the intrusive thoughts themselves had been.
He stood now, stillwater, staring down at the plastic in a distilled sense of matrimony. Bound, he was, to the way his conceptions and convictions swirled into one another, stirring in counterclockwise strokes. For what regard he had for such a humiliation ritual, he didn't know. For the hour he couldn't name, for the rising bile of self-loathing that simmered in his guts, for the fact his brain would never truly stop thudding—he knew how to soothe it enough.
He loosely took the handset, gentle and hesitant as he stared into what was practical nothingness. The light briefly reflected off of the smoothed corners of the device, of its divots and holes. He stared at that for a moment, too. Unavailable, unable to discern what he craved or describe what rushed his blood so methodically. There would be no point in the action.
If nothing mattered, it struck the halfhearted awareness within him with the solution, then what was the harm in letting inclination hush him. It'd gone sour prior, yes, left him repulsed and sickened by the way he operated on a desperate pleasure. However, there was tolerance on the other realm of life that he had not been able to attest to, advice that he could take, to shut himself up, to cease the outright ascetic that coated him whole.
He'd call upon the source of the issue, grit out admissions in sweet vallies, masked as surrealist nightmares of a man he couldn't name—rather than the disposition being from the man ingrained in titillating fantasy. The horrid part was that he liked it, after all. That was the plan, blanket and cloak it down in fervid attempts to keep the truth silent, while enough to know of the correct decision. To sleep. That was his excuse now, he needed to do so to properly rest.
Typically, he knew himself. Knew his choices with precision, knew why he acted in certain ways, why his surmisings spurred on in the chaotic ways that they often did. With an exponential increase in recent shooting, he'd found that sentiment blemished in convoluted style. Disoriented, he often couldn't feel the motivation behind decisions, reason them better—because it'd always plagued him with such apathy, that the logic was rendered deceased.
Now, it was all excuse. Fallacies he'd sing to himself, to tell himself he still knew what he wanted, knew who he was. And, yet, he could never seem to arguably rescind it, give himself that ability. To regain his own insight was to lose the lust of serendipity, a stake unwilling to be cooperated alongside. Instead, it left him in bouts of conflictions, such as now—free hand lightly caressing the clacking buttons, grip growing more forceful against the handset.
He eventually cracked.
The process was completely instinctual. The digits practically ingrained within his eyelids now, the number he'd call upon in all prior cases of ruin, even when the person in question laid beside him most nights in recollection. Times when Layne was too smoldered on something to cooperate, times when it was all ‘too much,’ when he, in such a juvenile light, would dial ‘just to talk’—even when it truly came from a need to hear the beauty behind the speakerbox, just to feel partially wholly in the lower harmony. It was borderlined routine in the places that each press was endured.
The ring toned through the receiver, which was now pressed against Layne’s skin, to hear whatever he could muster, behind the guise of distance and sickening internalization. He'd let himself sit on the edge of his bed by now, skin bare against torn sheets, almost like the bed was in the same condition, too. The tone plunged in deafening pulls, repetitious and flinch-inducing, taunting in such a voracious way, while all responsibility became idle.
Then, eventually, it ended. Not with an automated message, or a pitch that beeped, but instead, rustling. Motion, noise, shifting, all things that had become something utterly different in voyeuristic contexts, right through the wires of the machinery. Electrifying, to not only the operation, but additionally to the one impatiently drinking it's feed into his bone structure. Eventually, a shudder of a breath, an inhale in a quiet, hollow space—
“..Yeah?”
—Dreary and gentle, like a vibration wished to be against the skin. A chiming tone adored, running through sensors. Sometimes, that voice could run right down Layne's spine, had he been at the correct angle, seeing everything he could possibly endure with an atypical perception of detail.
Jerry, on the other line, his presence a ghost against those track marks. Kissing, all without needing to physically be present in such toppling deprivation. All over him, running through him, warmth that ceased to exist somehow against him either way. It felt like heaven, when he let it settle in.