Interplanetary: Jupiter {6/9}

“Jupiter is booming in the night sky.”

That’s how he described me to her, that night. One line illuminating a screen. He still saw her, then, when he peered into the darkness. And it was the only way he knew how to say so.

She thought of him in that moment, standing there on the edge of prairie land, watching me throb in the blackness — arms at his sides, an ash-coloured curl fallen across his forehead, eyes turned navy as they consumed the night. His scent was still on her sheets. Evidence of his touch was still on her skin. But I was the only thing connecting them now, a distant point of light where they could both reside for a passing second.

A lifetime in a blink of an eye. A dance across a floor made of clouds, spirals of blue and bronze twirling around them like rope, binding them skin-to-skin. A tumble into a pool of red, a turbulent mass they rode together, entwined. Ice crystals she played like a xylophone. Wind currents he wielded like a lasso. Lightening bolts they let rain down on them, catching the sparks on their tongues. A sheet of plasma they wrapped themselves in, tucking away safely when their bodies could take no more.

I was their celestial playground. For that last shared moment in time.

But I am no place to live a life. Roiling with gases and raging with storms, spinning wildly and lacking a surface to stand on — behold and beware. My doorway is a death trap.

He knew. And so he never looked back as he completed his journey home. Once there, he put on a new space suit and explored other worlds and other beings. He let her fall from his sky without making a wish.

Her life back on Earth became stable and quiet with no impossible to long for. It took a while for her to remember how to walk on solid ground. But it’s all there, in her memory — what it felt like to land briefly in a place she had only dreamed of.

“Hey, Jupiter,” she calls out every so often.

She hasn’t forgotten me.

Soundtrack: Wolf Parade, “Incantation”