jupiter . one

pogue Graphics 1,811 POSTS Pronouns: He/Him last seen Apr 16, 2024 18:41:45 GMT -5 Is she trying to interrupt our henna session?	jupiter . one Aug 17, 2020 21:49:25 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by pogue on Aug 17, 2020 21:49:25 GMT -5 Jupiter Graves. Eighteen. One. Career. watch the flowers bloom and watch them wilt and watch the rust spread itself across a long dulled blade, see blue and then red but not once do you see purple.
	Last Edit: Sept 27, 2020 14:28:41 GMT -5 by pogue

pogue
Graphics

1,811 POSTS

Pronouns: He/Him
last seen Apr 16, 2024 18:41:45 GMT -5

Is she trying to interrupt our henna session?

jupiter . one Sept 19, 2020 22:20:41 GMT -5

Quote

Post by pogue on Sept 19, 2020 22:20:41 GMT -5

C A L U M

J U P I T E R

Your mother never loved you.

You never gave her the chance.

Your first and only kill was etched into the shared cries and quiet heartbeats of a Mother and her Son. You came at night, under the soft lull of the moonlight peeking in through the curtains, coating an empty hospital room with all the innocence of midnight in the Summer. But innocence is gained just as easily as it is lost, and you pulled the life right out from underneath your Mother's still beating heart, midnight moon disappearing behind the clouds as your Mother's last breaths spilled out onto the sterile white floors of the hospital, staining them red with your first sin.

You did not come quietly into this world and she did not leave quietly, either, a give and a take and a life and a death.

You realized later, at the war torn age of sixteen that it was the only thing you truly shared in common with her: never going silently into that which is unavoidable.

---

You tried to make sure she was remembered, you really did.

Everything told you to forget.

The foster home had shadows that coated the hallways and carved their sins into the walls, and you could see their bloody claws within every cracked open door, snarling fangs and blood red eyes peeking in and reminding you of the life you never had, the life that never had you. It was the reason you always made sure it was shut, closed, slammed in the face of everyone who tried to reach into your chest and pry open a heart that had long been born sealed shut, the locked safe of a thief whose only true crime was stealing a woman's life. You thought of her and only her behind closed doors and closed curtains, the moonlight drifting in through the tears and the tears and reminding you of the ocean you had been born into.

You had a single picture of your mother that they'd left with you, yellowed and fraying at the edges and as cold as the ice that swarmed at your feet during the winter nights, thin blanket doing nothing to stop it from biting at your toes. You'd only take it out from the small wooden chest tucked under your bed when there were no other souls left to see you, when the silence was all that was left and the softclick of the door lock still rang in your mind. You'd line the picture up perfectly with the pattern of your bedroom carpet, always making sure the white stripes ran perfectly parallel to it because she was wearing that beautiful wedding dress in the photo and, in your mind, that meant her favorite color had to be white. You didn't know any better, you couldn't have.

Fingertips brushed against the photograph and you'd swear you could feel her heartbeat again and again, standing next to a man whose identity would never be known to you. He's smiling, she is too, but it's the kind that you only know of when you meet new couples looking to take home a survivor and a story. It's the kind that pulls at the edges of your cheeks, the kind that doesn't mean anything but what it looks like, the kind that is there only because it needs to be.

You wondered if she'd truly died the day you came into the world or if she'd been dead long before that. Your heart never found an answer.

Endless youth and naive persistence were the fuel to a fire that had long since been burning within a fragile heart, encased in a glass chest that rattled with every breath you took. It was a desperate attempt to make sure her life had been worth something, sneaking out at half past midnight and digging into the dirt a hole you could see from your bedroom. You'd plucked rose petals from the flower stand on your way home from school for the past two months, until you could cover the stone in hand with the things, all beautiful and red and innocent like the rose she'd held in that photo. Placing it into the earth you'd carved her name underneath it, L U C I, a shrine to a woman who was never known, whose life you'd taken so selfishly.

In your childhood naivety you expected roses to bloom from the grave, red and beautiful and burning like a white-hot memory. But you watched, palm pressed to the window of your room and breath fogging up the glass as dandelions were the only thing to welcome your Mother to her final resting place. Putrid yellow and inescapable, the world told you that the only thing your mother would ever be remembered for was nothing. In your innocence, you believed it. You stopped pulling the photo from that chest shortly after.

The dandelions had covered up her name by the time the men came, speaking in tongues and describing the warriors One was built off of, describing how you could become one, how much it meant.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" They ask you, and you hear only the silence you were born into written within your own pause.

"To be remembered."

Childhood plea mistaken for a need for valor and they tell you, with smiles on their faces, that you could go to a school that would make you big and strong and respected and-

they said remembered, knowing that it would bite at that heavy thing that sat in your chest.

Two days before you left that place the stone was dug up and removed, leaving torn through dandelions scattered in its wake.

One day before you left that place the photograph was burned to ash, her face foreign for good.

---

You see in red.

Or, you see in blue.

You went from drowning in the waters to navigating them with all the accuracy of a drunken sailor, broken down and built back up and broken down and molded into the same figures that stood on pedestals all around you. They call you a career and you call yourself memorable, convince yourself that you'll be remembered even amongst all your shortcomings. It's only written in the walls of the training center you pour your burning heart into, seeing red as you swing your sword and throw your knives and hearing it only when they announce you as the winner.

But the waves are always blue, no matter how hot the waters may be. To spend so much time seeing red, afraid of the night and that same moonlight seeping through the curtains and feeling the silence you had once called your own, the same silence that had chewed you up and spit you out and forced you to both remember and forget at the same time.

Fight in red and drown in blue, you wonder if this is what you were always meant to end up as. You wonder if this is exactly what your Mother had experienced: dying before you're truly dead.

It's a dangerous place to end up, when the world frays at the seams and only your emotions guide you. After all, who was ever there to tell you your heart doesn't have to be so heavy in your chest, that your worth doesn't have to be valued on how many knives you can land in the forehead of a dummy, that knocking someone to the ground in training does not mean you own power over them.

And so your heart sinks further into the waves, thrashing and violent. And you throw your knives, listening to the metal slide and scream in your fingertips. And you watch your opponent fall and claim to own a crown of your own making, however delusional that may be.

But the only thing you will ever truly own are the cracks you were born with, spread across fragile soul like bleeding veins of the damned. You've painted them gold over the years, watched them flash and shimmer in the sunlight and pretended they were beauty incarnate, dripping with distinction and endlessly alive.

But a crack will always remain just that: a sign of what’s been done and a warning of what is to come, charting a path to the scream and the shatter. It is unavoidable.

Last Edit: Sept 27, 2020 17:47:54 GMT -5 by pogue

pogue Graphics 1,811 POSTS Pronouns: He/Him last seen Apr 16, 2024 18:41:45 GMT -5 Is she trying to interrupt our henna session?	jupiter . one Sept 27, 2020 14:27:11 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by pogue on Sept 27, 2020 14:27:11 GMT -5 Am actually proud of this one. Good feeling to have while having a bad day . ripred_bot

Tom Moderator 5,143 POSTS Pronouns: He/Him last seen Apr 17, 2024 3:19:13 GMT -5 OowoO	jupiter . one Sept 27, 2020 21:30:06 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by Tom on Sept 27, 2020 21:30:06 GMT -5 Beautiful Bio, Pogue!
	Made by gamemaker 💀 hades lochlan