I feel like a time traveler; June, light-blue July, the color of the sky and soon August, all leaving without saying goodbye. I think this is how summer always is, a generous scoop, rich and bursting coral, dissolves in my mouth and I can't remember what it tasted like. I’m hooked on flavors, on a feeling I can’t quite describe, and it’s just another Thursday throwing up something I quickly jotted down last night.
Each year summer rolls around and it's just a diary entry with all the lines scrubbed blank where it used to hold (memories of friends I don't speak to anymore) (memories of places I can never go back to again) (memories of a person I can never become again) (with each summer our connections grow less and less sturdy) (you are one summer older and one summer less than the year before) (yearning for a past time you weren't even that happy in) (wanting to hit up certain people but you're one summer too late).
I think summers are always haunted by the one of the previous year. But not this summer, not this july, one that has not held me in painful sensation, in piercing silence. One that glimmers but doesn’t sear, only magic, internal magic, a sky-blue soul with the sheen of feather-light arms and I float.
I want to talk about a love that came to me surreptitiously, blooming in my heart quietly; floated into my heart onto its highest perch like a summer swallow. Sometimes I feel like I’ve loved for longer than I’ve known. How long is someone a stranger? I know eyes of boys i'll never hear laugh and i know the screams of women i've never memorised. I know the maps on your palms and the getaway scheme in your veins. And what about the girl who makes art in corners because what if a glance finds the drawings, the evidence, the crime? All the half ghosts with their half stories in Pershing square, the way i know that the girl with the green braids can smoke a pack (in a day) and the boy in pink shoes found his cheating boyfriend in an alley.
Then what about you? what about the stories i've woven from your smiles, your dimpled spine, the honey dripping from your eyes, hot on my skin, and the breaths promising me eons? I know you fall asleep to texts going green and i know that the first song you play in the car is always Pluto Projector. I know that you like your cookies chewy and you say you smoke recreationally. I know you rarely say the truth, too drunk on the persona you curated so meticulously. Months later, can I still say I know you? Will I be enough for you to let down your guard with me? Though I’m not even sure i ever knew the real you, but
I don't know how you are still so familiar to me—or why it feels less like I am getting to know you and more as though I am remembering who you are. How every smile, every whisper brings me closer to the impossible conclusion that I have known you before, I have adored you before—in another time, a different place- in some other july.
a three part series immortalizing the first july that hasn’t hurt like heartbreak !!! <3