Life Support Love Letters
An Original Story.

Still now, I send letters into space, hoping that some mailman somewhere will track you down & recognize you from the descriptions in my poems. That he will place a stack of them in your hands & tell you: There is a girl who still writes you. She doesn't know how not to.
Sarah Kay, Postcards

IN A LITTLE TOWN THAT SNAKES ALONG THE EDGE OF THE TENNESSEE-VIRGINIA BORDER, THE BRIGHTEST STAR IN THE UNIVERSE BEGINS TO SHOW SIGNS OF DEMISE.

(In tragedy's wake, the sea still sways and the moon still rises, but the sun parts from the earth in the way that all living things do: painful, familiar, and slow.)

AND IT IS OFTEN — BEYOND OUR GREATEST HUMAN EXPECTATION —DEATH, THAT IS WHAT REUNITES THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN LOST TO ONE ANOTHER IN LIFE.

MATILDA KINGSLEY is a girl fashioned from the skin of the galaxy, all starry-eyed gazes and organs bred to breathe life into bodies outside of her own. The heart that bides beneath her chest is akin to that of many others who reside within the loftiest parts of Chrysanthemum: worn down by the things that it has known, but willed to beat by those that it has loved . . . regardless.

LINCOLN MITCHELL is a boy born into the palm of privilege; he has a silver spoon in his mouth, all of the light in the world encapsulated beneath every tight-boned extremity from the moment that he enters it — bare-chested and blindingly pink in the face. Because he is so precociously written into a life of unfathomable success, no one thinks to warn him of what will happen if he slips through the cracks of each nimble finger on the hand that he spends years learning how to make a home out of. No one knows how to go about mourning that life, once he does.

THESE TWO CELESTIAL BEINGS EXIST AS THE ANTITHESIS OF ONE ANOTHER — one heaven sent and the other heaven scorned, an artist and a musician who are as unalike as the sun and the moon — until an accidental interception of orbits begets a draw to each other that is as great as all of the galactic matter in the solar system. Their collision will build something bigger, stronger than either of them has ever known before. In their wake, stars begin to fall; from a simple touch, a supernova is concocted.

WHEN LINCOLN GOES COMATOSE AFTER AN ACCIDENTAL DRUG OVERDOSE, MATILDA RETURNS TO HER HOMETOWN to confront the heartache that she left behind when she went off to college. In Chrysanthemum, there are could've-beens and almost-was' at every turn, people and places that make up her own human nebula — a celestial web of girlhood nostalgia that a part of her will forever be entangled in. Upon learning that he has been issued a medical DNR, Matilda begins to search desperately for a way to save herself from following Lincoln — her first and greatest love — into the looming fog of eternal damnation; and she finds it, as she always has, in creating. In giving an old flame new life.

For his final thirty days, Matilda sits by Lincoln's bedside and recounts the story of two binary planetoids, how forging their galaxies together would cost them every last bundle of matter in their makeup. How they would come to know this, but choose to chase destruction anyways. Through two timelines braided together by a series of almost-love letters, their story is brought to life in a setting that has otherwise been stripped of it; each one acting as a drop of water on the tongue of the parched (and thus, leaving the still-turning world around them to marvel at the tangibility of something that valuable, that indispensable.) These literary ballads are nothing if not Matilda & Lincoln's final swan song, their great, unfinished symphony, the only part of their relationship that the outside world has never had a chance to taint.

Until somebody goes and gets them published.

INTRODUCING......

THE FEMME FATALE!
(🎨🌸🎭🌙) 
Natalia Dyer & Raffey Cassidy
OF THE PRESENT &&& OF THE PAST
are . . . .
Matilda Kingsley

FUCK THE POEM!
I HAVEN'T WRITTEN IN AGES —

AND . . . .

THE BOY WONDER!
(🎸🌿🚬☀️)
Aaron Johnson & Timothèe Chalamet
OF THE PRESENT &&& OF THE PAST
were . . .
LINCOLN MITCHELL

— CAUSE I'D RATHER STARE AT YOU,
THAN STARE AT BLANK PAGES.

&&& with . . . . Jeremy Ray Taylor, Wesley Walker; Ella Purnell, Leah Wells; Rudy Pankow, August Hargrove; Logan Lerman, Keegan Beckett; Winona Ryder, Elizabeth Kingsley; Conan Gray, Jackson Fields-Kingsley,  Zach Gordon, Matthias Kingsley; Allison Janney, Frankie Mitchell; James Brolin, John Mitchell; Devon Bostick, George Mitchell; Emjay Anthony, Thomas Mitchell; Laura Dern, Jina Walker; Adam Sandler, Robert Walker; Madeline Cline, Willa Walker; Dacre Montgomery, Wade Walker; Sarah Drew, Mrs. Henderson; Leslie Mann, Ginnifer Packer; Jennifer Coolidge, Jaime Dillon; Aryana Engineer, Young Matilda; Jack Dylan Grazer, Young Lincoln; Described, Others.

Acknowledgements
you were the northern lights in a
southern town; a caustic, fleeting thing.

Author's Note — here are some important things to consider before you read:

✧ this book contains foul language, slow burn, mature themes, mentions of self harm, toxic relationships, underage alcohol & drug usage, overdose, automotive accidents, and death. i started writing this book years ago as a way to process the personal trials of teenage girlhood #lol, so it contains some pretty tough material. if any of these topics may be triggering, please proceed with caution; as always, a read is nothing compared to your health and well being.

✧ all plots, characters, and lines featured in this story belong to me.

✧ the psds used on the graphics featured belong to @/breewaffle on deviantart

✧ thank you so much for reading and i hope that you enjoy. <3

Dedications — (in memoriam) h.b. & r.w. & (in dedication) ethan, aria, + the milfs (soph,  lindsay, annika, tina, ash, maheeka) for their unwavering love always. <3

The Works! — Started 1/26/19 | Restarted 2/1/23 | Ended — | Published 1/26/19 | Status ongoing / being rewritten

© BANANAPOPSICLES / 2019
LIFE SUPPORT LOVE LETTERS