On hot days I think of other hot days. Not days as we know them; dusk until dawn or looping circuits of consciousness. I think of hot days in melting chocolate segments or single-scoop ice cream bites. A water-seeped novella of nights, ink blended through the pages. A long sip on a paper straw that gets stretched over an afternoon. A cool breath of breeze. The first crunch of a fresh guac-dipped tortilla chip. Hours layered in sweat, stress and sun cream. The eternal, optimistic whirring sound of a fan.
Hot days are a Hellmouth for all my big feelings; for moments recalled precisely.
On an objectively (and record-breaking) hot day in the UK, I was reminded, as I often am, of another. This hot day took place over summer in 2009; a steamy whirlpool of mornings, afternoons, nights and later nights that skip to the beat of MGMT’s Time to Pretend. I had listened to Time to Pretend and most of Oracular Spectacular once a week, at minimum, during the school year of 2008-2009. It was my roommate’s CD and we’d drive to campus together some mornings. I don’t think her CD ever left my car — a jet black Volvo with fuzzy pink dice that I spent more time in than my bedroom, and housed half the equivalent of my belongings. Over and over we’d listen to Electric Feel, Time to Pretend. Kids. The hyped-up chart bangers only. They were songs of hot days even when it minus twenty something degrees and in my car, listening to them, I felt so hot and alive.
I went home for the summer of 2009. I was two months from turning 20, which meant that I was both the oldest and youngest person in the world, at both the beginning and end of all time. I worked in a cafe with all my friends — I thought they were the best people to ever exist. We’d met doing shifts at this cafe having all gone to different high schools, in the same city. This, somehow, made us more powerful — having chosen friendships for no other reason than liking each other felt like a novelty only experienced when you go somewhere else. The hours of our days orbited around swirling, Saturn-ringed nights like tiny moons.
Two to four nights a week of that summer in 2019 me and the best people that ever existed would share a bottle of 20 Bees Pinot Grigio. We’d also share a taxi to the same two to four places that we always went, where we’d drink two to four (or more) drinks over the course of two to four (or more) hours. Rum and diet in tiny, transparent plastic cups and Liquid Cocaine, which was the only shot bartenders ever seemed to serve me, at least for free. We were so old and wise that summer in 2009. At least I thought we were. Drunk oracles dressed in bodycon black skirts and graphic tees from Urban Outfitters; decorated with Forever 21 gold necklaces in the drapey shape of owls and elephants. Queuing for the toilet together or licking salt off the tops of each other’s hands. In these two to four places, it felt like everyone knew everyone. And while beyond my friends I knew no one, not really, it didn’t matter. We were all sharing a neon season — two to four nights, and two to four places — that skipped like a trailer to the bass-y sound of Bounce by MSTRKRFT.
Every day of that summer, when I wasn’t working, I spent under the sun. I’d drink large black coffees laced with Splenda and iced cold diet cokes. I’d spend hours in the light sweating out my increasingly darker feelings as 3OH!3 played through my headphones thinking, over and over: I am the happiest girl in the world. It was during that summer that began waking up in the middle of the night, every night, feeling like my chest was collapsing and my brain cells were screaming and I’d think: I am the happiest girl in the world. I would measure my days in 150 calorie-d increments because I was the happiest girl in the world, and as long as I kept moving I could stay two steps ahead of the doom that had settled around my feet like dry ice.
I think about this hot day, that was equivalent to a hundred, thousand, infinite moments; twenty two million hot days. I think about how it changed every day since, and for how it felt — and how sometimes it still feels.
On that summer in 2009, off the dance floor, I lived each moment of every day like I was six feet away, on the other side of broken glass. Reality felt warped and distant like I was viewing it from beneath a bell jar. It won’t surprise you to know it was in that year that I first read Sylvia Plath. I thought: maybe this is what happens when you’re 19. When you’re the oldest person alive, the happiest girl in the world and your blood is fortified with aspartame. I knew I was going a bit insane. But I felt we all were. Or at least some of us were.
”Like, none of this feels real,” I said to the DJ smoking on the packed patio. I was drinking corona from a bottle because I was hungry. A Ratatat remix was blaring, and people were making out and falling and fighting like a renaissance painting. It was just another sticky night of electric feels twisting its way out of the longest, hottest days.
”I know what you mean,” he said. And went inside.
☾☽
some loves of late (always, tho).
Read: Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
Watch: Jersey Shore, Seasons 1-5
Listen: “I Do This All The Time” by Self Esteem
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