florida kilos.

on how it actually feels to have a sagittarius venus, nonchalance, and the fear of impermanence.

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i finally have the tan lines i’ve wanted all summer and i’ve gotten them about a month before i have to leave.

Toward the end of summer, I tend to think a lot about love. I think it’s a combination of leaving my home behind for another year of school and the fact that August is always the most emotionally dense month for me.

In the vein of thinking about love, I’ve found myself fixating on my Sagittarius Venus. When I looked at my birth chart for the first time, I felt a sense of disappointment. Everything I swallowed on Sagittarius in the Venus house seemed shallow and less romantic than the other signs. According to Instagram astrologists with a cult following and Twitter star scammers, I was shallow in love. Always moving, never satisfied, terrified to commit.

Every time my Venus sign comes up in conversation, I close my eyes and say a prayer.

The placement has always felt foreign to me, and I’ve always hoped that I would grow into it the way I did my Pisces rising. (I was devasted over that; too disappointed when my father dredged up the thin birth certificate with the accurate time. But Jesus Christ was that the truth. My huge eyes see everything and should’ve been a dead giveaway.)

Some characteristics did align such as the need for stimulation, similar to Gemini Venus placements. Love to me has often been visualized as a food spread. When you swallow it down, it is no longer in front of you, but inside you. It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t good. You still remember it. Still, sometimes you think of the next meal before your stomach has settled.

But my problem is that in most cases, I think of the meal I just had instead of the new one for the longest time. Everything is past digested, and still I worry I’m still too congested to sleep. I look up recipes to recreate it and take pictures of every angle so people can understand how beautiful it all was to me.

You understand I’m not talking about food now.

For instance, my mind often floats back to the handsome older man who was one of my first matches on Hinge. He wanted to take me sailing, watch me languish on his yacht. I just want a companion, he simpered.

He was handsome enough—dark eyes, sweet smile, a sort of tenderness to his greying curls that made me think we wouldn’t make it but we’d have a nice story between the two of us to tell—but I also knew that it was dangerous and I was never the one to take the risk of tanning in the Mediterranean lest I get taken captive.

Still, I said I hope you find one and let the match linger for 24 hours before unmatching in the hopes he saw it before I disappeared. Around that time I discovered one of my favorite French movies An Easy Girl  (2019). I relished Naïma’s naivety and saw myself in her.

Even now, I’m languishing at the club pool in my black bikini with a navy satin scarf over my hair, my bare feet pressing against the floor, and thinking of her “romance” with a much older man who—unsurprisingly of French cinema—is painted as a better man than his friend who manipulates and grooms her cousin before throwing her away.

This black bikini and what it holds—my body warm from the heat—understands Lana’s lamenting in Chemtrails. I’m not unhappy or bored, but I’m still so strange and wild.

And I realize now that it’s because that’s exactly what a Sagittarius Venus feels like. It’s the evening warmth on French water in a large boat, body sitting next to a man you’re not supposed to like as a young girl. It’s the sound of the water as my sister does laps in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. It was the flush of pleasure when I looked into the mirror and thought I looked like those vintage photos of Audrey Hepburn at her country house.

But my love is still twisted all up in the rise of my Sun.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆟 𓆝

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makeup by aimeetwistartistry on ig.

I’m a true Scorpio, there’s no running from it.

Am I secretive? Maybe. I think I’m more private. I’m terrified of impermanence and things going to shit.

Maya and I talk about this often. I envy her ability to move through that current. She’s currently in a relationship that she knows will end. They want different things at the end of their lives but she loves him anyway. I can’t do that. I think I can but I choose not to, I withhold.

I feel like the scorpion inside of me stings the archer and twists it all up. Two things always warring inside of me. Then again, in my Sidereal chart, I have a Scorpio Venus.

(Discovering Sidereal astrology changed my world. I refer to it as non-colonized astrology for those who don’t know. It’s why all my saved psychics and astrologists are from non-Western countries or BIPOC. It’s more real, not a social media soundbite.)

Of course, I don’t think I’ve poisoned myself or been self-destructive but I crave obsession. I crave a little tragedy. I think that’s the appeal of a sad man: not the sadness, but the show of emotion. You are devoid of nonchalance and now I want to keep you forever.

I think that’s the appeal of an older woman: I’m too young for you and everyone knows it, but people don’t understand how much I love you. Maybe we succumb to it but I loved you anyway. My mother hated you but I miss the smell of your skin.

It’s inescapable. One of my signature scents (I have two) is Missing Person. It’s an intrinsic thing.

They blur together and overlap too well, these animal placements of mine. The more I write, the more I realize that this is my Sag self-coming. I’m focused on losing what I have, the nostalgia. I’m already over it and it has yet to happen to me.

In “The Blackest Day” (which I have on good authority that Lana wrote about me) she sings,

Alt text: Carry me home, got my new car and my gun / Wind in my hair, holding your hand, listening’ to our song / Carry me home, don’t wanna talk about the things to come / Just put your hands up in the air, the radio on

I mean, that’s it exactly. Let’s not talk about it. Is that a fear of committing to something? All that gun imagery, you know? Guns in the summertime. Raining bullets for all that noise to drown it out.

But maybe I’m confusing commitment with my refusal to settle for anything other than what I want. I want what my parents have and I want it forever. I’ve always been a bit like that about life, refusing to lie down and take it.

I want a love that never denies me anything. And that’s the Scorpio again.

Choose your battles, my mom drawls over the phone. I can’t help but choose them all.

I check another astrology blog:

🩰 sagittarius venus

“They might be down for commitment, but they’re cautious about who they commit to. […] They crave that thrill of love […] They hate feeling tied down and want to keep their freedom because, at the end of the day, they belong to themselves.”

True.

( I scream the ending of “The Blackest Day” which is supposed to be devastating and symbolic of going sinking deeper into a pitch black streak of despair.

It's not one of those phases I'm going through / Or just a song, it's not one of them / I'm on my own / On my own / On my own again / I'm on my own again / I'm on my own again / I'm on my own again / I'm on my own again

Like really scream it. As if I’m terrified of this never happening to me. As if I have to sleep with my freedom around me like a blanket. )

And another.

“A Sag Venus will love a partner who can love them as deeply as they do while respecting their individuality.”

I want a love that never denies me anything. Maybe this is me.

Fuck.

comic art of lana del rey’s “florida kilos”.