A line integral (with respect to arc length) can be interpreted geometrically as the area under $f(x,y)$ along $C$ as in the picture. You sum up the areas of all the infinitesimally small 'rectangles' formed by $f(x,y)$ and $ds$.
What I'm wondering is how do I interpret line integrals with respect to $x$ or $y$ geometrically?
This is not a really detailed answer, however:
I think that pulling back the integral to the $x$ or $y$ axis is geometrically unnatural (and you have to decide how you want to do this, since generically $C$ will not be a graph over either axis), so I wouldn't expect a really good geometric interpretation. But you could do something like the following. Break up $C$ into pieces $C_i$ so that each $C_i$ is a graph over either the $x$ or $y$ axis, and then you can use the chain/substitution rule to literally write the line integral as an integral w.r.t. $x$ or $y$ for each $C_i$, and this makes the relationship explicit. This construction gives you (if $C_i$ is a graph of $r(x)$, for instance) something like the area under the curve $f(x, r(x))\sqrt{1 + r'(x)^2}$, so it doesn't seem very natural.