Aleatory heart flutters, it’s hard to say if I’m dying or I love you
We do not “summer” anywhere in these parts, and this limits what can be said about that certain genre of summer love story that generates so many palpitations and so much angst about why the world is the way that it is and how come what makes the world go around so often rends asunder the tight covalent bonds of fresh love, with no preservatives added.
We are still in the season. Pouty sullen sons and daughters of parents who can afford the beach and the crashing waves but lack the time to understand the source of the disconnect are soliciting appraising gazes of tired jaded sons and daughters of parents who offer the salt of the earth and depend on the progeny’s wages to keep the bleak reality from seeping back in. Star crossed maybe they are not, but these tax bracket straddlers are gone wild by the allure of the economic other and ecstatic convenience of Plan B, plus all kinds of autonomous clout attach to them in the piercing eyes of peers who wonder if they too could rinse clean in the glow of slumming down or bootstrapping up.
This is not for us. We stay put and just bask in the humid undertow of implacable mid-July heat and are too far gone in a life’s arc to play amidst the fantastic mental furniture of what it might be like to be like what you’ll never be or to be from where you’ve never even been invited to visit. The presence of this misfit in the midst of all this conforming bling draws the eye of the one who feels a need to stand out and be different, but is too new to know that this need is as common as a cold sore glistening in its sordid possibilities. Not a private club in the world has completely solved the problem of the member who thinks it a divine right to have carnal assignations with the help, and even the mostly new emancipated fitness instructor sunning by the pool will find it odious to come across the stink of a scandal that comes after.
Shoo the horseflies, snap the skeeter, prick the lone-star Ticks with sufficient force to make the engorged thorax pop into a fresh red blob, and save some time on some night to lie on the shore in the wet sand and count stars until the spinnies do their thing and the liquid courage catches up and is emptied from its vessel.