It's only been a freakin' week or so and already summer's doing a number on me, squeezing out that silky, languid longing for…I'm not sure. It's like I'll be walking by the window as a breeze comes in, and know that I've felt the very same breeze before, on another afternoon in July, on another night in August… Feeling the asphalt warm on my feet as I walked to the beach barefoot listening to Upstairs at Eric's on my Walkman, bummed that I had to waste my batteries to fast-forward through "I Before E Except After C." Hitch-hiking home from a club in Sag Harbor at 3 AM, wearing pointy frog-green shoes and black-and-white striped leggings…
These tiny memories come fast and oozy when exposed to bright light, leaving an ache that you can almost see-feel fading. Reminding me how simple summer is, so very much and only about skin and sky, be it at dawn or midnight…
Two Julys ago I got all Slinkadelicate on ssspunerisms, but this year the breeze blew in the rindonkulous memory of my first-ever kind-of-legitimate summer romance. It was the beginning of August before my senior year in college, and I'd finally given up on the guy who wore a fuzzy white hat and once bit my fingernails to see if girl thumbs tasted different from boy thumbs (that one's so you-had-to-be-there, I know, but it was actually quite romantic, and y'all know I'm a nail-biter).
Anyway, I was working the evening shift at the Paper Place in East Hampton when a creeper-wearing, ersatz-pompadoured boy came in and asked me to the movies. He'd seen me at aforementioned club, where I'd dance by myself in sparkly green 50s dresses and no shoes. I was picky and shy and fast-moving, so that stuff just didn't happen to me. Ever. He would pick me up after work and we would sit on the stoop in his backyard. No smoking, no drinking, just Woody Allen movies and red hots. One night I stole his underwear and wore it, too charming big, as we kissed under the bright white moon. His last name was the name of a Greek goddess, so it is quite fitting that I went to Athens at the end of the summer, and when I saw him again in December it was cold and over, mostly because I started crying like a weird jerk.
I dreamed about him once, that he was living with a woman with white hair and tried to bite me. The truth wasn't that far off--he'd hooked up with a much-older woman, and the last time I saw him he was wearing boat shoes, in a photo in an article about her in a local real estate magazine. And he used to make fun of people who wore boat shoes.
OMG, why am I telling you all this?! It's too late, I've already typed it.
