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June 3, 2023

everything else: every perfect summer

dear internet,

one summer i lay in bed reading bonjour tristesse. one summer i stretched across the faded yellow floral-patterned couch with white oleander, too young, feeling a little sick, the sunlight a square that came in through the window. in these summers the backs of my shins hurt from slopes and the entire day felt like an afternoon, enveloping and endless. we wrote playlists in notebooks. we fought over pictionary and didn’t want to set the table. we buttered slices of bread before sunrise. lantana summers. rowboat summers, my palms callused and sure. summers of eucalyptus and sunscreen and thin tomato soup that was once powder in a packet. in the summers before these were summers of loud rain and powercuts and the horrible hard thwack of beetles against lightbulbs. hot water for my bath heated on the stove, steam curling off my skin. walking twenty minutes to get the newspaper, mothball-scented turtlenecks, my arm curved around a frisbee. the itchy surface of my grandparents’ brown bedcovers. summers of mass-market paperbacks, of waterfalls, of trying not to look as we rowed past the house which lightning had cleaved, exactly and horribly, into two. mist summers, plum summers, bulbul and pinecone and tadpole summers: all these summers later i carry all these summers with me.

love,
t
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