It was a jousting match of cigarette burns and words. I left in a scurry of ink stretching across parchment, skin parched without the gauges left from his delivery. My mind was a dial, stretched to fix the obliterated prose that weaved in and out of my eyelids. The tendrils slunk around the edges of quills and daggers all the same. When we were severed, the irises dilated and pupils palpitated, grinding mechanically. I was machine. Metaphors shed from my skin, falling to the floor as bolts. No longer stoic, I fell as digits and letters and emerged in metals and methodic madness.