lanajvmeson:
“You’ve never seen Moulin Rouge?!” Lana gawked like she’d just witnessed an orphan in a prairie dress leaping from a church steeple, jaw dropping even wider. “I mean, that’s what’s so good about it. It’s, like, this whole other world, where rules don’t matter. And everyone’s so happy, even when they’re sad.” Some might say that Lana, herself, lived life like a musical, like anything could be solved with a twirl and the perfect costume. An ex had phrased something similar, in the past. Something along the lines of “you’re gonna have to start taking things seriously, you know, life isn’t a fucking movie”. But it was easier, following a script, cutting the worst parts in the editing room inside her brain, a big screen that only had room for smooth sailing. It hurt less. Besides, it wasn’t like anyone ever wanted to take a bite from a bruised pear – better to whittle the dark flesh, present them with something appealing, so ripe and sweet that she dripped down their chin. “Nicole Kidman looks like she’d eat me alive for sport. It’s so sexy. Honestly, like… that’s an iconic aura. Wanna just… catch it in a jar and sit it on my shelf. Like a night light, you know? I think it’d glow. Her aura would be, like, silver, like the moon. Werewolves fear her,” Lana rambled, blinking with a little fuzz already infringing on her peripherals, almost as if the world had taken a dusting of the fine hairs from the skin of a peach. She settled where Selene pat, legs kicked out and cowboy boots knocking, gentle against one another. Dorothy summoning her way home. Her grin was impish as Selene spluttered, bottle plucked for her to deliver a gentle kiss to the label, finger cropping up to etch it, after. “Don’t listen to her. Don’t do it! She doesn’t mean it. You is kind, you is smart, you is important,” she quoted The Help, bottle propped against a thigh where she’d doodled a game of noughts and crosses – or her version, at least, hearts and stars that glittered. Lana lost. It meant her opponent had taken her by the hand, lead her behind a wall to kiss amidst the fig trees. She hummed, at Selene’s question. “I got drunk off this really gross whiskey when I was nine. My dad’s friends were cool. Fun doesn’t always taste nice.” Something there, in that word. Cool. A lone thread spooling from the very last letter. Hastily stitched. Subject to unravelling, should anyone think to yank. “Anyways, can’t you feel it? Warm, and stuff. Makes your toes tingle. I bet this is what hedgehogs feel like when they curl up inside of bonfires. Or when you’re falling in love,” she rambled thoughtlessly, already in the process of pulling the absinthe to taste it again. It paused, by her lips, hovering like a firefly was a few feet over, glowing in the leaves. Lana wet her lips. “Don’t you think?” Blinking at her, wide and curious, she couldn’t help but ask it. Hot on her tongue. It needed omission, needed the air to cool. “Don’t you think it kinda feels like falling in love?”
Every word out of her friend’s mouth feels like the tip of a knife picking at her skin, just barely scraping, but drawing blood nonetheless. She wants to feel sorry for Lana without first feeling numb herself. But this is impossible; she is (as fucked as it sounds) almost jealous of the other girl’s dad and his cool friends. Selene is even almost jealous of the way Lana nurses the bottle like a child, swallows it down like her entire face is just a mouth. She wishes she had more mouth, which is to say she wishes she had more words. But she doesn’t, and instead, she sits there still on the warm ground, wondering what it would feel like to dig her fingers into the dirt. Would it be warm, too? Would it be living? There is an image, quite vivid, floating in her mind’s eye: she’s got her fingers two knuckles deep in her chest, feeling around all the ugly parts inside of her. Would it be warm there, too? How could it possibly be warm inside of a person like her? How could it be living when no one has ever cradled it? She thinks about the fact that mammals are warm-blooded, thinks about how the tips of her fingertips are always pulsing, but these are only matters of anatomy. Selene can’t help thinking that somewhere between her ribs, where her heart should be, there is instead a space that is cold and altogether unwelcoming. The thought almost makes her want to take the bottle back from Lana, but the long gulp she’d had earlier is enough to make her feel like her head is already spinning in little circles. And then the topic of love comes up and all she can do is feel her head continue to spin in circles and the coldness in her chest spread to the extremities of her body. She wishes she could stay like this, cold, enveloped in a case of ice where no one can touch her, where no one can melt her. But there is a shade of aquamarine that blinds her for a split second, makes her remember that her heart isn’t hollow but only forgotten, abandoned, and dusty with cobwebs. When had it been discovered again? When had the ice begun to thaw? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what to say. “I’ve never—” It is so hard to speak now; her tongue is just an icicle and it is so fragile, she is afraid of breaking it. So, in only a whisper: “I’ve never been in love. I don’t know what it feels like but…” She thinks about the sour taste of absinthe on her tongue, the feeling of nausea. “I hope it doesn’t feel like that. Do you really think it feels like… like… this?”
