Pieces of Summer
Summer contains multitudes. I could explore them forever.
Some context via an excerpt from my Summer/Autumn 2024 Newsletter:
The clouds outside my window are looking ominous. I’m writing to you now, fairly smugly, with a hot black coffee in hand having slipped in a morning cycle before the heavens inevitably open upon the poor summer holidayers who “just want to have a nice time at Colombia Road flower market and a beer in a pub garden”. You must read that, as I overheard it at the train station, in a gruff Yorkshire accent and through gritted teeth.
According to the UK’s most gleefully pessimistic news sources, London has its wettest summer in history on the horizon. Which doesn’t sound great, even if it has allowed us all to make many a bawdy joke both on and offline. Part of me isn’t so sure that all this doom and gloom is really necessary. Summer in London is always a bit of a fuckboy. You’ll bask in its warm affection, drink wine outside at a trendy and expensive bar and play wilfully ignorant to the fact that it’s probably not going to stick around with any consistency for the next couple of months despite making you feel like your time together could, like, totally be something serious. Eventually it’ll become a digital nomad and move to Spain where it posts mysterious instagram stories of glorious sunshine and hot people implied to be enjoying what you guys could have had all 365 days of the year if you’d only played a bit harder to get. But I digress.
The point is, even when it’s a bit bad, summer in London is still pretty great. But so are summer holidays. The consistent things I like about summer anywhere in the world where seasons are actually a thing are to do with the senses. Seasonal produce prepared just the way the locals have forever, all the ‘L’ words (louche, loose, lethargic, languid, lust, lists), longer days/more time, road trips to the seaside with iceboxes of white wine, salt (from many sources) on skin, sex on unfamiliar sheets, showering together before dressing for dinner and heading out into balmy nights, quiet early mornings with bright burning sun on your face and a steaming coffee clasped between your hands like a prayer. Summer contains multitudes. I could explore them forever.
This letter is a celebration of a season that I’ve always felt is a kind of stasis, a suspension of disbelief. Summer break; a holiday from real life. So I’ve written you some things. Some of them are true things based on my experiences, and some of them are made up things and some of them are something in between. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which, if that’s the sort of thing that matters to you. Some of you will know for a fact which of them are true things. I hope that reading this delights you as much as writing it and living it delighted me.
Pleasure // Purpose
In the taxi, we pass a blue car driven by a large, squat man. I watch him coast, his arm out of the window, hand parallel to the asphalt, allowing the breeze to run along his arm. He does it for the sensation; his arm is immobile, suspended. A flash in my mind of cormorants, wings outstretched, basking in the sun. I remember that they occupy a genetic grey zone between modern birds and their reptilian ancestors. They must bask to dry their wings which lack glands which produce the water-proof slick which prevents the water logging of other birds feathers. It must feel good to them. Pleasure is functional. We’re all just animals, in the end.
“The most important requirement for an object to be considered beautiful is that it fulfills the purpose for which it was conceived” - Antoni Gaudi
Sticky // Sweet
We folded into each other, almost neatly. The precision of the way he touched me made me feel clean and cared for, like the patient of an expensive clinician. It was luxurious and cold and made me shiver with pleasure. I thought of the ice cream we shared earlier.
We had walked from the harbour where the wind buffed our face, and the gulls wheeled overhead. I took his hand and felt its smooth surface against the calluses of my own palm. Lifted it to my face and put his thumb in my mouth, baring my teeth wickedly. “Oral fixation,” he laughed, “come on, let’s get you something better.”
Eating ice cream is dangerous territory for the nymphomaniacally inclined. Although the magazines sold us red lips wrapped around rocket lollies, teeth and tits and denim shorts, I never appreciated it beyond the kitsch. Give me the clean, glossed curves of a soft serve. I could fantasise about pink mouths against that yielding white forever. Almost translucent cream trickling over fingers and down wrists.
I watched his tongue methodically follow the grooves of the ice cream’s swirl, wrist twisting the cone upwards. He never missed a drip or allowed it to become mis-shapen or asymmetrical. He was so careful, and completely absorbed. It made me want to bury my fingers in my own ice cream, scoop it out of its cone and into my mouth, to completely obliterate myself with the taste of it. I wanted to go to him with my face smeared with sweetness and feel his slow, measured touch tempering the sticky open-mouthed hunger I felt around him.
Day // Night // Repeat // Stop
The catamaran banks right and the sun slips around the corner of a cloud, slinks into my lap like a cat come to purr. It’s difficult to imagine that anywhere else exists right now. We are circumnavigating the island and it might as well be the whole world. We’re just in its orbit, counting its 365 beaches like stars. One for every day of the year, if you like. If you have forever. We might as well. The days feel endless, flowing from warm sheets to pools to bars to beaches to boats and back to cool sheets waiting to be warmed by our bodies in the night. Lather rinse repeat.
The agony and the ecstasy of this is that it is not ad infinitum. I’ll return to London, finish my book on the plane, and complain wistfully with friends about the grey days we’re so unjustly having right now. But I’ll look at my tan lines in the mirror and text you. “Thank you.”
Hungry
I am in New York, my legs are bare, it’s warm and I wear boots and feel the muscles in my legs flex as I walk. I feel very alive here, but very small.
New Yorkers appraise you. They assess you frankly if you are worth their attention. I feel gazes drip down my body, the heat of eyes on my back. I enjoy it. The animal plainness of it is so unlike the complexities of British sexual politics. You know a Londoner is attracted to you by their sly looks on the tube, shifting down on contact. The subtlety of their movements in your orbit. A remark in solidarity in a queue, ‘good weekend?’, an offer of a seat, pressed-lip rueful smile. Londoners are cats leaving their affections begrudgingly on the doorstep. New York dog people versus London cat people. American English versus British English.
Luckily for me, I’ve never felt compelled to choose between cats and dogs, nor do I ever tire of expanding my vocabulary.
“We are so busy
being small and hungry and alive.”
(Excerpt from ‘Tomatoes’ by J. Sullivan, 20??)
Signals
Eye caught on the tail of the air stewardess’ skirt. She walks briskly down the aisle away from me, the underside of the slit in the back winking a flash of bright yellow against the navy blue of the pencil skirt. On, off, on, off like a nautical signal light. Like a duck’s tail wagging. Like the painting at the base of a geisha’s neck. // I wonder idly whether this was a feature included on purpose and, if so, what was the purpose? Was it a distraction tactic? A bright colour to divert the attention of a predator? Had it prevented me from staring at her arse while she hurried away from me? “Don’t eat me, I’m poisonous.” Did the ‘H’ in ‘HR’ stand for ‘harebrained’? Because, no, of course it hadn’t.
Ice // Melting
In my previous state, I moved. My atoms shifted over and around each other orgyastically. They were always touching back then, hand to hand in a contradance, in and out and around, the mass of them shapeshifting and all the while I flowed fluid. A liquid. I ran. That’s what they used to call me. Running water.
Parts of me broke away and that was fine. They began a new life somewhere else, with the clone atoms of another body of water. A drop in the ocean. That’s what they used to say. It’s just a drop in the ocean.
Oh, but I was useful too! The luxuriously placid reservoirs, the tension of the pent-up dams. I longed to burst back then. I had so much energy surrounded by so much of myself. I was pressed up, pushed up, and licking the walls as I paced around and around myself, humming with the pull to rush downwards.
I cleaned and rinsed and baptised and filled. I gushed through pipes most everywhere I was needed, and anywhere I was wanted. I suppose that’s how I got where I am now. Poured out into a these new shapes, changed in the darkness and cold. I hibernated (apt given the sub-zero temperatures) until I was needed again. A hot day call for relief, and here I am.
She lifts me to her lips languidly, running me across the lower, leaving a trace of my former self shining against it. I am hard against her. This is a euphemism and it is not a euphemism. Before I came to be in her hand, I was contained in cold and darkness, and I took on a different form. I am solid now. Although I have hardened, I can be held. I feared that the loss of my fluidity would make me less free and less joyful. I did become colder, but not like that.
At her touch, I melt. Her warmth carves through me and I turn back to my old self.
Water // Closer
I watch couples of all ages cling to each other in the pool. They swirl gently, eddied by the waves of children playing in the far end. Being held in water, chest to chest, my legs around your waist. Sometimes I crave it more than sex. A different kind of intimacy, a purer one. Holy water. A dual baptism.
Sex is a lot of things, but it isn’t everything. On hot days I love to hold an ice cube between my teeth and sneak up on you to press my cold, wet mouth against the nape of your neck. Your reaction is different every time. You never get old to me.
“You can fuck anyone
but with whom can you sit in water?”
(Excerpt from ‘After Bombardment, Sonya’ by Ilya Kaminsky 1977)
Strangers // Hot Cities // Evening Showers
Each evening I see you from my window. Please don’t misunderstand, I didn’t seek you out. I have no desire to invade your privacy. We shower together by proxy, that’s all. In this city, apartments tessellate together, all Escher-esque staircases and Hopper-esque squares of artificial light. I noticed you this summer, when the heat of the day cornered us into our shared moment in time. Going to bed with the salt-slick of the day's sweat settled on my skin was unbearable and I could tell you felt the same as I did by the way you tilted your head forward, hand braced on the tiled wall, letting the water run over the nape of your neck. Relief.
Standing in my own shower, I can see you standing in yours from across the narrow street between our buildings. The lower half of your window is frosted, and mine is distorted in waves. Your hair is short, and mine is long. Your shelves are spartan and neat, and mine struggle to hold bottles, boxes and plants craning their leaves toward the light. We’re very different people, you and I. But here we are.
I take the opportunity to bathe communally wherever possible. I am the tall oddity in the onsen, the one using the scrubs in the wrong order in the hammam. It never puts me off. I love being with other bodies, varied and unselfconscious. I wonder whether you would be self-conscious if you noticed me noticing you.
Wives upstairs took showers
Caught
A glimpse of their backs
In hallway mirrors
I sat in the dark
Invisible
On the backporch
Drinking in the night
(Excerpt from ‘First Blues’ by Saundra Rose Maley 2015)
Footnote: I had many many other themes, thoughts and things to write about. A Summerettes Part II, if you will. This, as well as other creative and content of all kinds will be shared on my Sunroom (launching soon!)