Last summer was strange like the way red wine is strange to your virgin taste buds when you are small. But it was different this time because now my mom wasn't around to gage the size of my sip, and laugh when I made a face at the sour taste; this time I stole a bottle and drank it down til I fell asleep. And in the dream the sun was bleeding red when it lay to rest in the west. And the drives were long and pointless, and only occurred when the sky was blushing, or crying, and when the music was good. And I was never at the wheel. Maybe that's because I was still drunk, maybe it's a metaphor for lack of direction. But my body was as lost as my bones felt.
The first time I got drunk enough to feel like dancing when half a bottle ago I wanted to use the jagged edge of that bottle to cut my brain in half. The first time I got so high I could feel my heart thumping like rabbits were fucking in my ribcage.
The first time I wanted a boy to hold me down by the head with no love softening his grip, and his silver purity ring digging into my scalp glinting moonlight off his cheekbones, and use me, and squeeze me empty like a tube of toothpaste until he cracked me, until he came inside.
The first time I sat on the floor and liked the way the moonlight on the kitchen knives; bone white like dog teeth. And pressed the big one on my wrist, and wasn't scared. And thought to myself, "Maybe." And the next night, "When I'm ready." And weeks later on the Sunday night before the first day of school, "Soon." It wasn't romantic, it was too real for that. Not a lover, but a twin; a body part I found missing under my bed.
Last summer I didn't do any of the shit you're supposed to do. The beach, and ice cream, and summer camp, and blue jeans. I searched for the city cause I wanted to suffocate on carbon emissions, and fuel exhaust, and nicotine. I searched for the girl, and we ran around all night. On trains, and other peoples bicycles. With menthols and yellow streetlight making us look older than 16. Or making the 25 year old who fucked her on the dumpster, just not care that she wasn't.
Last summer it was just me under this duvet blanket of sky. All I did was watch my neighbors plant flowers and eat lemon cake my mother bakes cause she thinks swallowing something yellow will paint my insides happy, and watch art in the cinema, and in the museum. All I did was feel.
Last summer was a warm house, with sun seeping in like butter, and yellow wallpaper. And real life is ages later at midnight when the food in the fridge is rotting, and cigarettes everywhere but the ashtray, and bodies on the floor from when everyone who lived there dies from murder and disease and suicide. Real life is when the house is haunted.
The spring was in focus and I remember every second. But last summer was soft, and last summer was hazy. Like maybe I was swimming in the tropics, and walking on the moon.
