in advance of summering
I count myself lucky to love a summer girl who takes a pleasure in the heat which I have never mastered. Example is the best tutor in matters like this and I feel myself bend toward the sun under her gentle stewardship. I am learning to lie still on the beach, albeit slathered head to toe in SPF 70 and putting my shirt back on for part of every hour. I want to want to be warmed up. There is an openness to the season that puts me on edge because of my wiring or one bad June. I don’t mind bug bites; I know I waste the afternoons. It simmers. Then it’s August which can taste like regret. The shame of missing going back to school. The infantile fear that I am failing to have enough fun or the right kind. The nagging sense that I should be all the time either 1. sprawled somewhere half-dressed reading something smutty 2. fuzzy on a third chilled wine and telling a too long story in bits between laughter-swallowed asides 3. looking at the sky or the water or some burnt grass and feeling knocked out of my sandals by the wonderful, hi-octane stomach punch of being brief and breakable trinket or ghost in a world of unbearable size and beauty and that whenever I’ve not managed as much, when I am just watching TV, I’ve marked myself as a joyless stiff unsuited to ease and pleasure. Plus, what the soup dumpling sky does to my hair and the baffling variety of types of shorts which exist in the world and the seeming impossibility of determining which ones you should wear. On and on ad nauseum these squinting pink-eyed neuroses I wish to carve from me with a sno cone spoon. There were easy childhood summers I know and a not inconsiderable amount of effort spent to give them to me. Still I remember so much waiting and letting myself down. All the furious wanting and being slicked with sweat. I’ve long been likely to cry on the ride home. I have to practice savoring and going forward after. What follows is a list of my goals I will, if not necessarily achieve—not really the point—reach my arms out long and lazy at til autumn comes.
eat a peach naked
soft serve twist
read something scary enough to keep me awake that night
read Summer Sisters again in one go
read Picnic at Hanging Rock again by a pool on a roof
read something painfully sexy and very weird
dress like a ninth grade boy in 1970
dress like Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley
take an edible and read The Talented Mr. Ripley
ten baseball games
I know there is no reason to want to tie dye. It’s that old jealousy about summer camps I didn’t go to. Unbecoming. Do you remember Bug Juice on TV?
I’m ready to get on the kind of roller coaster you think may kill you.
we should go to bars less and donate the money saved
really I’ve stopped wearing makeup, but summer is for cherry popsicle mouths and it’s fine to create that with chapstick. I use the Nivea blackberry kind.
write poems and let someone read them
write cards for something more than only birthdays
write long cards for birthdays
call my mother without waiting til I get that sickly sore muscle kind of ashamed and sad from putting it off too long
egg a billboard for that fucking godforsaken Quiet Place prequel that has been haunting and threatening me for months
my first beach bonfire, something I once believed only happened on The O.C.
fish tacos
swim a long way
be very still
strawberries
wear a swimsuit that I like. forgive myself.
take pictures and print them out
let my face freckles darken again because no one lives forever
let my haircut grow out because it’s fine for it to look bad
high daily step counts and movies in theaters at eleven am
I’m interested in more street fruit cups
I’m going to go fucking nuts when we see Twisters
Maybe I’ll write something more interesting in this newsletter one day. Not now, though. Sorry.
It’s hot here all the way towards Thanksgiving or after some years and I hope by then my sock tan is ugly and proud.