We travelled back to our apartment in silence. Once there, we continued to sit in silence, each one of us avoiding eye contact with the other.

I thought about Stefan. Could that be my fate? Or Ly’s fate? Could I handle being in the hospital, with a tube stuck in my nose, completely at the mercy of some doctor or nurse that I didn’t even know? I didn’t want to think about it. I tried my best not to think about it.

Elio broke the silence. “Why don’t I make us all some soup? That’ll make everyone feel better!” He sprang from his chair and began gathering ingredients.

“I don’t want any,” I muttered.

“Me neither,” Ly chimed in.

Elio’s face flushed red with anger, and he threw the vegetables on the counter in frustration. “Are you fucking serious?” He glowered at Ly and me, his eyes pounding from the blood that was rushing to his head. “Even after seeing your friend practically dying from starvation, you both refuse to eat? How does that make any fucking sense?”

I turned to him defensively. “Our eating habits are none of your fucking business, thanks!” I spat this retort as venomously as I could and glared at him as though he were my mortal enemy.

“So, what, you’re just going to starve yourselves and die because you want to have control over your life or something?” He began to wave his hands around in exasperation. “And that really makes sense to you?” he screamed.

I started to mutter an excuse for our illness when he angrily cut me off by yelling, “I don’t wanna hear it! It’s bullshit! All of it!” His face flushed redder and his right hand gripped hard onto a cup that rested on the counter. “Why the fuck can’t you just see it?” His body whipped around as he hurled the cup across the room and straight at my head.

I watched the cup come flying at me as though it were in slow-motion. Elio stood in a similar stance to the Ancient Greek sculpture The Discus Thrower, with the distraught expression of Jealousy from Bronzino’s An Allegory of Cupid with Venus stretched across his face. As Elio became an abstract glitch in my line of sight, I became frighteningly aware of how quickly the cup was approaching my face.

My heart stopped and my focus became frozen. Some primal aspect of my brain took control and forced me to leap out of the way just as the cup hurled silently past, and loudly shattered into an abstract mosaic that spread in a spiderweb-like design across the floor.

I dove against the apartment wall and covered my head with my hands in a subconscious gesture of self-preservation. Ly stepped in front of me and stretched his body to act as a human shield. While I couldn’t see his face, I could feel the anger emanating from him. It radiated as a heat that was initially comforting, but quickly became nauseating. As I quivered and sobbed, I imagined Ly glaring at Elio in disgust and rage, his mouth twisted to reveal his tightly clenched teeth, his eyes bulging from their sockets, every vein enflamed and throbbing with the beat of his rapidly increasing heart rate.

With tear-clouded eyes, I watched Elio’s expression turn from anger to fear, regret, and sadness. He covered his mouth with his hands and began spurting out a string of muffled apologies. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he frantically repeated as his hands slowly slid away from his mouth, across his cheeks, and through his hair, till they rested behind his neck and curled themselves together in a tense, cradling gesture. He squeezed his arms against his jaw and struggled to suppress the tears that nonetheless began to stream down his cheeks and glisten in the artificial yellow light of the apartment.

I stared at him blankly as my body quaked with fear. In that moment, I realized I didn’t really know Elio. I didn’t really know what he was capable of. I didn’t really know the depth of his anger. Or the source of his fears. Or his potential for violence. And these facts filled me with terror.

“I’m sorry!” he sobbed as his body curled into a standing fetal position. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to!”

In a dynamic motion worthy of a Futurist painting, he grabbed his jacket and flew out the apartment door while my mind was still trying to process the series of angry events that had just unfolded in front of me.

As the reverberations of the slammed door resonated through the apartment, I released my forcefully pressed hands from the side of my head and looked up at Ly. He looked down at me with his jaw clenched and his eyes twitching as they struggled to cope with the rage that still flowed through his malnourished body. I swear I could see the blood pulsating through every one of his protruding veins. “Are you okay?” he asked.

I steadied my vibrating body and lowered my hands to my sides. “I’m fine,” I replied as I inhaled and exhaled a huge gasp of air. “I’m fine.”

I stood up and stared at Ly. His gaze appeared to be directed at me, but it was really aimed through me, towards some invisible source of anger, which I could only suspect was Elio. But I didn’t dare ask or push the issue. Partly because I didn’t want to know what the answer would be. And partly because I was afraid I already knew what the answer would be.

Elio returned two hours later. By then, Ly and I had cleaned up the broken cup and prepared a meal we all could agree on. Elio said nothing when he entered the apartment; he didn’t even look either one of us in the eye. He simply stood, head bowed, hands hanging limply by his hips.

“We made soup!” I exclaimed as I picked up a bowl and presented the meal to him. “It’s chock full of vitamins!” My voice was a wobbly mixture of fear and uncertainty.

He looked at me and smiled, his face beaming with the smooth, satin-skinned youth of a Renaissance cherub. “Is there a bowl for each of us?” he asked.

“Of course!” I muttered, fighting back my anxiety at having to actually eat a meal.

Elio gently took the bowl from my hands and raised it in a gesture of cheers. My responding cheers was lacklustre, while Ly barely uttered a word and only limply lifted his bowl in response.

“I’ve got something for us, as a way to apologize,” Elio stated as Ly and I begrudgingly worked our way through our bowls of soup. Elio pulled six tinfoil-wrapped tabs of acid from his pants pocket. “Two for each of us!” he exclaimed with a smile.

My mind raced with anticipation as we quickly devoured our meals and ingested the LSD. Within minutes everything around me began to undulate like one of Bridget Riley’s optical paintings. My body started vibrating and I began buzzing around the apartment. “Can we go out? I wanna go out!” I sputtered as I frantically threw a blanket, some weed, rolling papers, and several bottles of water into a backpack and herded Ly and Elio out the apartment door.

We stumbled our way to the river valley where Ly and I would go for our daily walks. We stopped at a patch of grass, gripped each other’s hands, and began to spin in a sinuous circle, much like the figures in Matisse’s painting The Dance. We collapsed on the ground, staring up at the sky, the whole world still spinning in a glorious series of concentric circles. With my arms and legs stretched out I felt like the figure in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. I laughed as I imagined myself enclosed in both a circle and a square and began to wonder what such a situation would feel like. Would I feel trapped? I didn’t want to feel trapped. I wanted to feel free, the way I felt in that moment. Free and weightless, seeming to float above the ground, the grass tickling my skin nothing more than an illusion I could easily dismiss.

Elio reached over and grabbed my hand, forcing me back to reality. I began to massage his palm with my thumb. He giggled and his body began to twitch. He sat up, leaned forward, and pressed his lips against mine. All my blood seemed to rush to my mouth. It felt as though my entire life force was being sucked into Elio’s body while being replaced by his life force, so that, for a moment, we were one being, one person, locked in an eternal embrace. This moment was broken by the sound of Ly’s forced coughing, which reminded us both of his continued presence.

We stood up and ran to the edge of the river, where we halted our bodies in exaggerated, cartoonish gestures. As I looked around, the acid transformed my vision so that the world resembled a pointillist masterpiece of individuated colour just like Seurat’s Un Dimanche Après-Midi a l’Ile de la Grande Jatte. I felt as though I could physically feel the colours that surrounded me. I even tried to reach out and grab the shimmering specks of complimentary chromatics that seemed so momentarily tangible, yet disappeared just as my fingers were about to grasp them.

Suddenly, Elio’s hand came streaming out of nowhere, grabbed my hand, and pulled it tight to his chest. The fading light of the setting sun struck him, and he appeared spotlighted, as in one of Caravaggio or Rembrandt’s paintings. He nodded his head towards the river and repeatedly twitched his eyebrows.

We took off our socks and shoes and began wading through the river’s shallow edge. The liquid enveloping my bare feet sent vibrations through my body that alternated between extreme hot and extreme cold. The water swirled around us in beautiful slashes of shimmering blues and yellows that reminded me of the sky from Van Gogh’s Starry Night. We laughed and splashed water at one another with the edges of our feet, each of us stumbling about, struggling to hold onto our precarious sense of balance, and thus splashing ourselves more than each other.

We hopped out of the river and staggered along the concrete path till we reached mine and Ly’s special spot. We put our socks and shoes back on and I spread the blanket I had brought across the rocks. We sat down in as comfortable a position as we could, and I rolled and lit a joint. The sun had fully set, and the sky was enveloped in varying shades of black with sparkling sets of starlight that danced and dazzled before our eyes. It reminded me of Whistler’s infamous painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket.

“Do you think your friend Stefan will be okay?” Elio asked, breaking the stillness that had fallen over the three of us. Ly and I exchanged a nervous glance but offered no reply.

A long, painful silence passed, which was again broken by Elio. “Why do you do it? Why do you starve yourselves? I mean, what do you get from it?” He rested his elbow against the rocks and stared me straight in the face.

I looked away, walked to the edge of the river, and quietly contemplated my long journey dealing with anorexia.