beatnik summer
everything is true, except for the parts that aren't Xo
The first official day of summer and it tastes like a stale Marlboro red. Though this city rarely loses its lust and often defies even the grimiest days of the year, today is not one of those days. Today, romance is no better than a rogue popsicle stick melting on the pavement. Today, the city gets to run its laps around me and that someone I shouldn’t have kissed. I don’t dwell on what he might have meant when he said he missed me—I’m far too seasoned to waste the day on such ambiguity. Instead, I think of all the times where I’ve missed someone and said nothing. Maybe I ought to credit him for his bravery? Maybe he’s less of a coward than I originally thought? Then again, I miss you is nothing more than a low-grade emotional reflex—circumstantial at best, opportunistic at worst, valid only after midnight. I blame the Heat for his loose tongue.
The Heat—capital H for sentience—is more of an affliction than it is a season. An indolent tyrant that seeps into the bones and renders otherwise capable people me lethargic and susceptible. It’s the accomplice to every sultry misstep, the fever that will eventually find me again in the winter. I’m a sucker for the seasons but am never fully committed to any of them. And I think that’s the problem. Not the Heat, but the constant elsewhere-ness of my mind. Even now, I’m already writing the winter version of this moment. I'll recall the stale Marlboro red like I did before, make some throwaway remark about how summer is the season of revisionist history, and then inevitably wax poetic about the privilege of enduring all four seasons as if the mere fact of change is a spiritual reward. I will conveniently overlook my lack of presence and instead mock the suggestion of having a “beatnik summer” by a man who wouldn’t know beatnik if it slapped him across the face.
Since I’ll do anything to escape ramifications of any kind, I am pivoting to the Eagles poster that’s been above my closet since the day I moved in. Six years, a thousand Marie Kondo purges, at least three big moral collapses later, and I’m looking at it as if for the first time. It came with the Hotel California vinyl, a relic from when I romanticized Southern California and male falsetto as the apex of freedom1. I’m fascinated by how my eyes have adjusted to its presence. Fascinated and also slightly unnerved that, in the slow churn of habit, my brain just stopped registering it completely. Am I just fragile right now or is that kind of sad? To think reverence was replaced by an indifference so subtle I barely noticed?
I spent a lot of that year lying on the floor. It wasn’t sexy enough to be manic, nor peaceful enough to be reflective. It was just the sort of suspension that comes when you’re twenty-three and have too much time on your hands. There are years where you orbit the prospect of what you’re becoming, and then there are years where you concede and ask what you’re allowed to be. I knew I wouldn’t always get to linger in my confusion. I knew I wouldn’t always get to lie on the floor and not cry. But I was still young enough to feel the draft of an open door, still young enough to let the wind dry my tears without telling it how or at what speed. I was all heat and awareness; I had very little interest in self-restraint. And the longer I persisted, the more I understood how one day you’re sprinting across state lines for the world’s greatest excuse and the next you’re just happy staring at the sun directly. That twenty-third summer stripped me bare, and the twenty-fourth turned me inside out. But truthfully, I didn’t care much then. My nails were always chipped and I thought quite highly of myself because I was reading a lot of Kerouac. If I had been robbed blind or brazenly smacked in the face, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Not only could I do whatever I wanted, I did. Where the hell did that mentality go?
Even in the fantasy of wisdom, it seems I am chasing some kind of summer—a beatnik summer, a brat summer, a hot girl summer, a Lorde summer. Maybe being born in June means I’m genetically predisposed to chase the feeling forever. I didn’t anticipate the twilight of my twenties to have such a visceral impact, but twenty-nine is really a strange age. You’re old enough to be blamed for your patterns and young enough to still call them phases. You notice the difference between what you want and what you can hold and how often those things are at odds. People ask you about “next steps” as if you’re some property developer willing to hand over your blueprint. There is no blueprint, honey. There’s not even drywall. There’s just another room with another door that’ll open when I say. I am dedicated to no one but myself, and you see how unreliable she is?
Maybe this chasing—this endless, fumbling pursuit of summer and whatever it promises—isn’t about finding anything at all. Maybe it’s the ritual of movement alone. The fine distraction and even finer philosophy. Maybe what people mean when they say you get “wiser with age” is not that you stop doing the stupid thing, just that you can explain it better. You've studied your astrological chart enough to know you're prone to delusion. You've read Howl enough times to know the best minds of generations are destroyed by madness. You know the city will run its laps around you, like it’s doing now, with an indifference to your faults. You know this because you have mistaken motion for growth one too many times, and because it wouldn’t be a beatnik summer if you didn’t do it again. And even though you’ll probably write this whole season into something smarter later, you must strike while the pavement is hot.
As if I still don’t think this…
"old enough to be blamed for your actions, but young enough to call them phases" is exactlyyy how I felt at twenty-nine--it's such an odd in between time. I adored this piece!