K's story

I remember being a little girl and going to the beach with Mom. I was glad to leave the desert for the water. The summer heat was unbeareable unless I was near water. Pools don’t count. I don’t care if I ever see a pool again after last summer. I can still feel the sting of the chlorine. The summers become more frenzied each year. I’m not sure how much longer I can live from season to season. People look at me and see luxury and elegance. Inside I want to scream, I’m still that scrappy girl who threw sand in my sister’s eyes and pulled her hair.

I hate their assumptions about me but I hate missing out even more and that's what keeps me in the game. Showing up at glossy hotel lobbies and running through the hills all night in heels is now routine. When I can fill my days with work and nights with magic I feel alive. Scenes from rooftops and art openings and treehouses sear my memory with a tingling, almost painful pleasure. I drip elegance on camera but after the makeup comes off I laugh and dance and become my gawky goofy self again. I miss my siblings now. My brother is in a band and he never comes home anymore. My sister sticks around to share some important moments but never without drugs or a new boyfriend tagging along. I miss the sandy beach days where it was okay to get all messy and the worst that would happen was that Mom would forget her cell phone and shrug her shoulders as if to say, oops, I guess we have the day all to ourselves. We would dig holes to China and smear wet sand on our noses before diving into tide pools as warm as bubble baths to emerge shiny clean before getting dirty all over again.

I breathe in the salty air. The sun and the wind beat down on me until I can no longer keep my eyes open. I think about what I might do that evening and then I think about what I could do differently this summer to slow the chaos. I crave the energy of the city in the heat but I don’t know how to get a read on my own emotions in that setting. The energy drips and melts from one night to another with barely a moment to reflect. I’m sick of planning my life in five second increments of found time. Miami, Los Angeles, Tokyo. I keep all my jewelry in little ziplock bags and am ready to travel at a moment's notice. Sometimes I forget if I’m going across town or across the ocean. City grids snap in and out of my memory before I can remember where I've woken up. I have survived a few years of this lifestyle but plane rides are still long as hell without Ambien and yet too brief to feel like I have actually gone anywhere.

I give up and embrace the chaos that the summer brings, inviting it into my fragmented head. How do you know if you're okay when your basis for reality hinges on appearance and artificiality?? I muse and then the relative importance of the sharp, pierecing summer energy becomes apparent.