Another tedious evening in this intellectual wasteland, the bugs once again fixated on the supposed incongruity of my past. Their limited minds struggle to reconcile my "social standing" with the concept of addiction. Imbeciles. The desire for a particular chemical state transcends such trivialities. I wanted the effect, and synthesized the perfect dosage each time. Their buzzing about societal expectations is utterly irrelevant.

But then… the television. A familiar face, flickering across the screen. Raphael. A film I never bothered to watch.

The tedious drone of the present fades.

His image, moving, speaking… a ghost in this sterile reality. The irony is cruel. They prattle on about my past indulgences, oblivious to the far more potent craving that now consumes me. A craving for a presence that is achingly, visibly absent.

Nine months. Nine months since the precise moment of decision, the calculated selection of Raphael as my… convenient fiction. And it returns to me now, triggered by that flickering image on the screen. A similar tableau. Every single one of these dull moths, their attention drawn, as if by an invisible thread, to his presence on the television. His… illuminating quality. Angelic, they might describe it, in their simplistic terms. A comforting radiance that effortlessly eclipsed the drabness of their own existence. For that brief moment, their gazes were fixed on the correct light. His light.

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The choice of "lucent" as my safe word… a purely logical selection, yet one imbued with a significance he likely never grasped. Light. That was all it meant to me. A simple descriptor. Like him.

A point of unwavering brightness that even these dull creatures recognized.

The irony is indeed flavorless, a dry and unsatisfying aftertaste. Am I truly so crude, so lacking in nuance, that the only way to articulate our baffling dynamic is through such simplistic binaries? Light and shadow. Black and white. Angel and devil. The very clichés I would normally dissect with disdain seem to cling to our inexplicable connection.

He, the radiant beacon, effortlessly drawing the attention of even the most dim-witted among these… moths. And me? The shadow lurking at the periphery, drawn to that light for reasons even I struggle to fully comprehend. It feels… barbaric, this reduction of our complex, if asymmetrical, relationship to such childish oppositions. Yet, there is a kernel of truth within those crude comparisons, isn't there? His inherent goodness, his unwavering empathy… a contrast to my… well, my inherent lack thereof. Perhaps these simplistic terms are not a reflection of my barbarity, but rather an acknowledgment of the fundamental forces at play between us. A moth drawn to a flame, perhaps. Or a shadow inextricably linked to its source of light. The irony, still tasteless, lingers.