ASTRONAUT BOOTS
Author: Queen Nightingale
Rating: T
Note: Experimental JPLE
You're trapped somewhere between Narnia and Neverland, pirouetting on a dirty space rock, freefalling around Neptune. You want to drink in the emeralds crazy glued to his lips, but fall short of the requisite amount of courage. There's a frog in your throat – suddenly – and you hiccup it down, lost in the galaxies of his broken cheekbones. Nobody understands you, nobody, since who would understand a girl who struck a boy with lightning.
Suddenly, there's a blast of awareness shooting up your jugular like freezing cold water, and electricity roars through your ears like thunder. He's glaring at you with those empty diamond eyes, and in a second, you lose your breath.
"I love you."
His eyelashes curve upwards like ravens taking off into the sunset. He is, in fact, sunset flushed – a boy-demon with a snapback hat on a skateboard, racing through traffic and dodging the screeching, electric time machines. You're in love with the cubic zirconia studs in his ears.
Your fingers lace through his hair, sprouting strange daffodils by different names, and you become addicted to chasing their scent – sadness. He's the elegiac hum of crickets on soft summer nights, and then he's gone – lost to the other drugged souls raging in confined black boxes with flaming lights.
When the pearls of his canines glint in the retreating sun, you're left with caterpillars for eyebrows, a map of Saturn, and astronaut boots – but no pilot.
And you – you're a horrid little girl in an apothecary on the moon, tending the cash register with a hat made of cumulonimbus and gold. In your mind, he tells you as he storms past on his skateboard: "I am entranced by the sunbeams echoing around the hollows of your eyes," and the poet in you falls in love. You lie beside him on the pavement at one-in-the-morning on that cold summer night with something a lot like melancholy bursting through the veins to your heart, and there's a taste of sadness and whiskey on your tongue. You don't know why.
You do recognize the stars digging into his anorexic spine when you tilt your head and drip your gaze over his portrait. You spot his nose, dazzling with luminescent metals, his lips coated in phosphorescent red, even the sapphires pouring – tumbling out of his ears. You're devastated, simply because your rib cage tells you that your heart is about to break.
You've read that 'Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes', but you beg to disagree. The world as you know it has just splattered paint down your cheeks, pulled rabbits out of your ears and covered your eyes with tinfoil. You've just been tossed into the Pacific Ocean head-first, screaming, and suddenly your hollow life purpose has been redefined.
It's that same night, and you're still lying with your shoulder grazing his but then suddenly you are exploding into melted gold across the blackness of the firmament, and the space behind your eyelids has filled with white. You're leaving the pavement and leaving the cold stars and standing up and now you're just mad, mad with sadness.
You walk away from the boy with kisses and shockwaves dusted across his lips, and you become Betty Boop, crawling into your muggle Escalade, batting your spider eyelashes as salt drips down your dry, dry, cheeks.
Suddenly he's got his wand out and your car is floating in the sky and you're falling off the edge of the world, your head in your hands and the car is settling back down and you can't handle the electricity pulsing in the back of your spine.
Your door is ripped open with his hand and you're staring at him with his wide eyes and beautiful bones.
"Why are you leaving? You just told me you loved me!"
You're shaking and you don't quite know what to do so you just sit and look forwards and you're alone on the faded spring night and the crickets are still humming and you taste fear on the edges of your gums.
"Lily. What are you doing?"
"... I ... I don't know. I need to go." Your voice cracks in half.
"Go where? What's wrong?"
You feel like you've swallowed the shards of sunbeams and they're pulsing down your esophagus now, bright and painful and white. You don't know what to say. You're looking at your hands and you're playing with your fingers and you're terrified of what you just said to the boy with his hand on the side of Petunia's car, the car that you stole to meet that crazy wild reckless boy in an abandoned field on the edge of Mars.
"Lily, Lily, look at me."
You flicker towards him and then dart your whole gaze onto his eyes, which are warm and know too much and you feel like shrieking from the sadness wracking your body.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. It was a lovely night. I should probably go now, let's just forget what I said please because sometimes I just talk too much you know this James - "
He's leaned in and now he's got his hand splayed out over your cheek and his forehead is on yours and you forget the meaning of sorrow.
"Lily," he's speaking slowly, and his eyes are burning into yours, and you try to move your face from his but his hands are too strong, "Lily."
You look down for a second and sadness rips through your bones. It's a faded spring night and there are no streetlamps on the abandoned factory road, no cars, no lights, just a boy with his arm leaning against a Cadillac and a girl sitting inside, with sadness dripping down her spine.
"Look at me."
You look at him.
"I've loved you before you let me in, and I will love you even after you are gone. I love you in the way the Sun searches for the Moon, day after day after day, even though the Moon is too scared and keeps hiding from his flames. I love you as the fox loves the hound, the sky loves the ground, the snow loves freshly shovelled pavement. I am never letting you go. You are mine, body, mind, soul, and I am yours, until the planets explode and die like the stars. I don't know why we are this way, but I will love you even when you get angry, even when I am alone on Pluto searching the craters for your lost body. I love you in the way James loves Lily, and that's enough."