I will remember this summer in passing showers

Indigestion #3

Welcome to Indigestion, the semi-weekly column where I connect the dots in ways that upset my stomach, though this week it hits more like ginger peach tea to the gut. Thanks for being here, I hope you stay forever.

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I will remember this summer in passing showers. Packed into the only Uber XL in Manchester, New Hampshire with the rain beatboxing against the dull metal on the way to a wedding. Skies big and blue like wide baby eyes turning to fits of weeping on the drop of a dime bag. Spritz of mist carried on the wind as a reminder to blink, clear the expectations like windshield wipers and turn your head up to get yourself small. It really was not a very wet summer but I only noticed this when the wet rolled in, tapped my rosy shoulders and crackled against my ear don’t forget about me.

Yet it only ever came in passing, a lover on the move dropping kisses like clues–nothing is ever permanent, babe. I love you, but here I go. Keep the love tucked between your teeth and lips, suck on it like tobacco for as long as it lasts.

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The whole of the season seemed to revolve around this one day, grabbing tapas with a pair of friends in Jamaica Plain. Should we sit outside? Gorgeous day, but it’s so hot. Are there umbrellas? We angle the chairs around one half of the iron lattice table to catch the tilted shade of the tasseled umbrella. The sun beating down looking for delicate cracks in the skin to fill with crimson. Patatas bravas burning on the way down, too eager for the taste to let any heat dissipate. Paella in a cauldron draped in twiggy little leaves. I remark, as if I ever eat at nice restaurants, that the flavor profile is rather simple. Could use a few more layers for the palette, I decide.

At the table next to us a man and woman are catching up. The man is eating well but still casting his gaze my way with a different sort of hunger. I’m not interested in anything but the flattery and it does fill me up. An ex told me once on a silky summer day that he couldn’t concentrate with my thighs out and now I wear shorts every chance I get, let the pale skin glow in the noontime light and still wonder why anyone might want to look at it directly but take whatever skittering glance I can scrounge up.

The cloud appears above the land as if manifested by a bored deity. Surely it won’t. We all take turns saying it like a ward and of course it does. All at once the patio accepts the deluge. We huddle under the umbrella with those other two, my back to the man, both of us thinking about how my ass looks in denim shorts. Proximity shifts the potential. The rain comes down so hard the pavement rejects it with a force and the remnants bead like morning dew on my leg hair. The paella is a lost cause, the cauldron turning to a wet and unappealing soup.

i bet the plants are loving this!

This is crazy! we take turns exclaiming, less like a ward and more like a marveling. The staff are panicking, closing out tabs quickly, staring up at the sky with a benign desire for control. A gay waiter runs around holding another patio umbrella like a parasol asking every table we all good here? everyone okay? then offering covered tours from the patio and into the restaurant to wait out the storm.

The restaurant has a tiny record/book store attached to the dining rooms like an afterthought. It’s impossible to move with all the people hiding out but I comb through the records anyway. Clairo’s Charm had just come out that morning and they already had it stocked. The guy working the little store tells me excitedly that he’d just been spinning it to start out the night. He loves the soft rock sound and I agree.

This is crazy, we’re still saying, laughing every time we say it because it’s skidded into joke territory and we wanna keep saying it because the whole thing feels like an unplanned aberration, a glitch in the system and it’s exciting. Nowhere to be so we’re here. When the downpour lets up, we step into the instant humidity and walk to the Whole Foods to grab some dessert we never got the chance to order. The whole walk down the street the rain comes back in fits and starts, indecisive. Everything is romantic, I’m saying. Fall in love again and again, Meg is singing. 

A gay couple is breaking up on the sidewalk. I steal a tres leches cake slice from Jeff Bezos because I’m feeling inconsequential. The mesmeric grins on my pretty friends’ faces. The whole world is cut sharply with a clarity piercing the thick heat. The clouds are still big, dark and mountainous on the horizon where the sun spills over in a golden watershed. A predictable rainbow descends like a satisfying climax.

On Meg and Kat’s porch like a treehouse we smoke weed and listen to Charli. Lemons on the trees and on the ground. We go dancing despite the heat where the DJ plays 365 three separate times and the clouds dissipate with a carelessness. Ah, that was nothing, they seem to say. Just passing through.

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I, too, have been a passing shower but already I roll my eyes at the metaphor which hardly holds up under scrutiny. I pour myself out in short, surprising bursts that are difficult to pin down as real or genuine. I’m mostly always holding something in so when it comes out I can’t tell if it was born from some inevitability or if I’m really being true to a fickle internal compass.

I don’t remember the weather patterns of any other summer falling back through the history of my body in space. I’m a marionette being dragged through the heat with all my lanky limbs scraping the pavement.

I’m tall, wide and blue-eyed and then dark and stormy in the flick of a wrist turning the faucet. Sometimes I’m an aberration. I don’t seem to make any sense to myself or fit neatly into the collage of the moving day. Clarity only ever comes momentarily and never long enough to reveal anything but the most obvious: where have you been? you coulda been right here all along.

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On a daily evening walk around the reservoir, I’ve almost finished my loop when the radiant sunset tricks me into believing there are no clouds above me, taunting. The rain starts up and I hold my arms out, laughing like remembering an old joke with a friend I no longer speak to. The couple walking my way turn right the fuck around, unprepared to be damp bodies.

But then it stops as quickly as it started and I cease my jogging toward the treeline and the couple turns around once more, hopeful that this too is passing. We smile at each other and shrug, like oh us wet humans. It’s a different experience.

the shower, past

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We’re gonna do book club outside for once, sprawl out by Jamaica Pond and talk in circles meandering away from the book itself until we remember the whole point was just to lay around with friends eating fruit and sitting in the context like coconuts ha ha ha. But then the day before it wasn’t supposed to rain and it did anyway over and over without even a pointed glance at the numbers on the app that promised zero percentages across the board. The wet licking the heat into a cowlick, summer’s alfalfa. We’re debating the merits of taking our chances. No one trusts the forecast. It feels great to outsmart the oracle and call their bluff, but also the oracle should actually know shit to be deserving of the title, my friend Matt says about the weather apps. I have autism about this, obviously, he adds.

I’m worrying, autistically, about spreading a blanket on the ground and feeling the residual water from yesterday’s storm well up under my gay butt, being soggy for the rest of my life. The way a single uncomfortable moment can unfold into a forever grass-stained blanket. It’ll always be like this, no such thing as a passing shower. I almost can’t argue with it from a philosophical perspective. If I want to be present in the moment, then this moment is the only one and the rain could go on always, I could be trapped in it forever even if I’m enjoying it.

We play it safe and gather in my living room like always while the sun keeps smiling out the window all day long like a smarmy little smirk. The sun is a passing thing too, daily and predictably or in the grand scheme of the universe like a blink in the face of time. Just like me! Everything is me if I look at it hard enough, and I find this coyly comforting. Everything in passing, everything romantic, every moment where I am until the next moment wraps me up.

We get dinner down the street and start a running joke that we beat into the ground so hard it comes back around to being funny again. Out on the restaurant’s balcony, the sunset dazzles and never ever stops.

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I’ll pass someday like a river from the mountain to the sea and I like to imagine that I’ll think then of this summer as a turning point when I started paying attention and made a soft point of it. I’ll think, huh. Everything was romantic. I remember it. I was looking to the sky then and the ground, too, maybe all over everywhere. I noticed the patterns of the rain, the expansion and contraction of the sun. My friends came round and I let them sweeten my time. The summer passed, not in a blur, but in attentive bursts, sprinkles on hot skin, big fruit grins pressed into a warm pendant against my chest.

Well, that’s lovely, I think.

jw

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in a place that can make you change / fall in love again and again

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What I’m Devouring

I saw Why Bonnie open for Christian Lee Hutson last year and became an immediate fan. I was a little bit high and I remember them playing one song and thinking to myself This is the best song I’ve heard in my entire life. I still haven’t figured out what song it was but their debut album 90 in November ended up in my rotation for weeks afterward and this new album is no different. It’s just great rockin’, country leanin’ music. All The Money scares me a little bit. Three Big Moons keeps making me cry in all the gorgeous humanity it holds in its weird little sci-fi landscape. It’s a cool, confident album, big recc from me.

A Creature Wanting Form by Luke O’Neil

I gotta hand it to

Adrianna Nine

this is probably one of the best book recommendations I’ve ever received, not merely in the quality of the book—which is great—but in how much I needed this particular work to cross my path at this particular moment. So many of these stories feel like they could have fallen straight from my own noggin. The voice is so clear and funny and devastating, it spoke volumes to a voice I’ve been suppressing in my own writing, one that is a little bit kooky, a little bit indulgent, and entirely honest. This collection was a true gift and I’ll be returning to it for a long time.

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A Creative Week in Digestion

For the past month or so I’ve been going through some really difficult growing pains, creatively. Grappling with the nature of sharing my writing online has been exhausting and depressing. It’s hard taking risks in my work knowing that it can be instantly observed, critiqued, scrutinized the moment I release it to the world. I was feeling beaten down about the whole thing. I came closer than I care to admit to throwing in the towel and giving up on this venture to keep myself safe and coddled.

A couple things changed. The book I mentioned above came to find me and helped me see straight though a lot of my own creative dishonesty. I took some time away from the project I’d spent two months heavily invested in and was able to return to it with an honest eye and come to some important conclusions about its next steps. And lastly, I took a mini vacation from my day job and social media/screens and spent a long weekend journaling about my creative purpose to remind myself why I write and for who. This break/inner attuning produced the short story Rabbit which is probably my favorite thing I’ve shared here thus far and was my most well received piece of fiction. The kindness, rather than the validation, that was born from it showed me I’m back on the right path.

I’m not quite ready to share what’s shifted with the project I’m working on, but I will still be sharing a novel here next month and I’m still grossly excited about it. More on that soon. Love from me to you, always.