The world was a canvas for every artist, lover, and poet. It could, in the end, be the utmost tragedy to try and live out visionary dreams. Reality would always surface eventually. Poetic delusions in the minds of lovers promised a life as romanticized as cinema. But it was as any broken-hearted rendezvous promised, one would always love the other more.

Whitman Augustine’s utmost goal was to live a love worth dying for, to write his life uninhibited. To “exhaust in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.” as Rimbaud would say. He longed to break the cycle of mundanity: a commonplace love, an ordinary one. He revered fleeting connections. However, Lorelei Mathis in her tower over the hill, born impartial but bred into oblivion- abhorred love, that illusory drug. She got her fix in fiction, but in real life despised the reality of it- the inevitability of heartbreak. In the books, happy endings were surplus, while in the outside world- realism was a damsel in distress longing to be saved. She promised that she would not be as the others had been, a victim to the wiles of men and all their petty seductions.

For the two so opposite in worldviews to meet was a lapse in the natural flow of things, it defied the schedule of meaningless encounters. To its imaginary likelihood, it was as the movies said it would be, utterly inconvenient and haphazardly incomparable. It would sicken the masses with implausible standards. The romantic rode on a caravan of cliches, and it delivered them straight into the arms of invention. It took a sort of religious faith and a devout hope to manifest this sort of meeting of dreams. But even in its fictitious personification, imperfection was not only plausible but inevitable.

Whitman embodied eros, exhausting the feminine through countless lovers. As a result, he picked up some traits himself, sensitized to every movement, every change in demeanor. But what he truly desired had always seemed unattainable: a woman who enraptured his mind, body, and soul. A woman who shared his craft: poetry. He ran through enough non-intellects to know that they ran rampant in this dirty world.

Lorelei Mathis acted as a true subject of myth to the world, and Whitman Augustine wanted to decipher the inscriptions of her being, that enigmatic thing that sat in her soul. Their meeting was born in the heart of a bookstore, their concoction of brevity staring straight into the void. They spotted each other across the pillars, those bookcases filled to the brim with hidden knowledge.

Lorelei was distinguishable in a crowd. Whitman saw her as a disaster waiting to happen. The woman could enrapture him. She was untouched by understanding, while he held the key to esoteric knowledge.