Fifteen and pretending to know what love is; mistaking it for kisses and strawberry ice cream. Hands on thighs and waists with too many clothes in between, too many intruders on the amateur scene.
I know what this feels like, a beast in your mouth, city lights to make up for a star less sky. Fingers entwined, heads on shoulders, promises fitted into the nape of my neck. My eyes are always searching for you in a room, always searching for a door to escape through. I have called your arms my safest home, and I have called the warmth under my blankets your name. There are far too many songs to feel like, far too many movies to live up to.
You have taken my trembling heart, held it in your hands, put it away in a glass cage and handed me diamonds to fill up the space. They are too heavy, too still, too foreign in my ribcage and they don’t beat to the music of this pounding room, they don’t push blood through these veins that are now rusty from disuse.
Your lips fold against mine so certainly, where do you manufacture confidence? I know it is not someplace I can find on Google Maps (trust me, I’ve tried), but if you hold me just right, I will manufacture it too, meet your lips as certainly as you meet mine. But you have guarded this secret so jealously, all I have left are the insecurities you cast aside, and an anxiety blooming in my gut, like algae quietly suffocating the ocean.
But I have my moments. I lead you on the dance floor, twirl you around. I hold you when you stumble. You’re a pretty crier. Or so I have convinced you. I hold your words with caution, it is something I have learned. They tend to spill all over my white dress, permanent stories of drunken exploits, stupid things with no meaning. I prefer them, their honesty, to the well intentioned promises I know you could never keep. I cannot blame you, I return the favor just as often.
We are victims to our world’s understanding of love, its immediate expendability. The idea that you have to devour something you love the moment you see it to keep it yours. Insatiable and impermanent; unfathomable but interchangeable. My mouth is tired from carrying the weight of my tongue soaked in the consummate language of collective consumption.
‘I love you.’ says a message box on my phone. I wonder what your face looks like when your mouth forms those words. I wonder if you believe them. I take them with a pinch of salt, but I take them nonetheless. I go to sleep wondering what is the opposite of medicine.
PARACOSM 