IN JUPITER IT RAINS

e i g h t e e n

YEARS FROM NOW YOU'LL ALWAYS BE THE "I LOVE YOU" SAID TOO LATE

blood runs in our veins and kisses every crevice of our being. we begin to create ourselves in the map of our arteries, spilling ourselves around our insides in an attempt to protect the soft / the vulnerable / the slippery parts we hide in the soft folds of our stomach. we are not naive in our hiding or our secrecy of the stones we swallow & let sink to create potholes in our lungs. we are self-made fish drowning in the oxygen we have grown to love like the bitter aftertaste of fermented apple juice or the sting of alcohol poured into a wound —— there is addiction in how it burns to swallow a pill without water, there is admiration in the rejection of water, there is emptiness in the unfulfilled sensation of a dry mouth salivating over a pea-sized capsule. we love to create desire & forge it from the buzzing warmth liquor leaves down our throats. we consume the need for longing in the way we replay a love song over & over - listening - waiting - echoing in the thrumming of our heartbeats that one specific line, that monumental chorus, that lyric that makes our eyes sting and chest lurch. the balance we keep to protect ourselves makes longing a ribbon tied around our ribs, makes desire a heavy stone in the throat, makes love calcify like bones.
//
it makes it perfectly clear how it is between you & me. our story could've been one for the ages, love, but we protected ourselves too well. forgot that to live, blood must circulate - must carry in and out of the heart. & we have long since grown stagnant in our need to replenish ourselves. sometimes i wake to find my fingers curling around an invisible hand, sometimes i think if i were given a day i would spend it tracing your veins. if we found the source of this ache, i'm sure we could stop it. maybe we could retrace time and frame it anew in our fresh eyes. forget the words we chose to cliff dive off of & the ones we nailed to the roof of our mouths. make oxygen stop burning our drowned lungs. //

if loving you was so easy, i hope years from now i forget your face. erase your touch from the sides of my waist, your lips from my neck, your voice from the words it's entangled in my hair. i wear you like a cameo on my skin; "come on," it seems to whisper, "ask me about the boy who made me know love. ask me how it felt to let someone else protect me. ask me how i survived when we were too afraid & walked away. ask me why he's still on my mind to this day. go on, ask me. give me a reason to let his memory stay."

kryptoning for being everything and so much more