Goodbye to all that
Every year you’re surprised the old girl’s still got it in her, thinking surely it was curtains for wonder after all those hostile lunar plains and skeleton trees, breath fogging car windows under navy 4 o’ clock skies.
But careful: look away just once and she’ll slip through your oily palms, a wraith in a silk slip dangling one-armed from the sill of your open window, half dead even while her breath is still tropical on your dumb and hopeful cheek.
Through Calippo-stained lips you’ll scream This is it! The summer that changes everything!
But like always you forget she’s a dead woman walking. Girls lighting one cig off the last in the cut grass swell, a single wet pearl licking its way down a Corona, alien mouths under orange street lights in Hackney Central: these were her funeral’s dress rehearsals and you attended willingly. Warming up just in time for the cold, cursed to forget how fast she moves every year.
Like clockwork she scoops the meat of your heart out when the blossom comes in April, its sweet fruit an omen that this new season will make your stomach sick with too much beauty.
In May you drink long pale pints and feel her gathering strength, dissolute and vain, sharpening her teeth and binding her blistered feet. A man with hopeful eyes tells you woman you’re a weapon of mass destruction and only because you understand this season makes idiots out of all of us, you manage not to laugh.
In June she lies down on the molten tarmac in Soho and invites you to join her, screaming don’t be so fucking boring darling and laughing laughing laughing as beautiful boys in Jil Sander step over her like roadkill.
In July, sheet knotted between glazed thighs, a square of moonlight on your wrist, you write terrible poetry about your bewitchment then rip it to shreds, mango juice running through your fingers. He licks them clean: she says, get it girl.
August you can smell death all around, a rotting tooth that requires extraction. The spirits have skipped town, no longer willing to make the commute through this unlovely soup. She sympathises: she’ll be off shortly too.
Goodbye to all that. In the end, it’s the same as it’s always been. You want her because she’s already halfway out the door.
