Summer is my season.
In summer, I rise in love.
I press fake tattoos onto my wrists and tanned shoulders. I flirt with my own femininity in dresses that feel like water. Soul-mate reads entrance me and I spend sun-soaked time by water drinking in books that melt into me, that change me.
In summer, the sun styles my hair blonder and humidity springs my lion-mane into thick curls. I dance in the ferocious blaze of heat. The intensity alchemizes aches and hopes into bolder iterations, and my summer iterations adventure in ambition and love fiercely.
So I welcome the unbridled, unapologetic emergence of a Texas summer. I swim through molasses-like air and perspire in a life that slows into a sugary sizzle.
I wonder about the heat as I select the dress. I am sixteen browsing through the boutique and the red-belted dress winks at me. This dress is the woman I quietly long to be: bright in confident expression, colorful in a whimsical floral pattern that is spunky feminine, and off-the-shoulder coquettishly sweet.
I don’t buy it, at first. The reason lost to a shuffle of memories, but I do remember the feeling of disappointment, my own alarming self-disappointment, which prompts me to think that I self-sabotaged the shopping trip.
If I remember that startling feeling of disappointment, then I also can feel the exuberant relief when I return to see the dress still waiting for me. When I am sixteen, oh! but I’m not sixteen! No, I am seventeen. Realization revealed!
I am seventeen. And that seventeen-year-old me harnesses all her bravery (because she is highly introverted and highly sensitive and she’s skittish to assert herself as a writer, but through a resiliency that rivers from that wiring of sensitivity, she does it anyway) to attend a summer writing program at Kenyon. And she packs the dress that beckons her daydream self into a hesitant and determined reality, and that campus existence writes the script to this summer morning.
The dress I wear to claim myself as a young creative writer I adorn a decade later to meet a friend, and in my itinerary of the weekend, I sketch out space to write, so my seventeen-year-old self feels seen.
In my red-belted dress, I slip into the tropical atmosphere of my car, and in shuffling through my music collection, I stumble upon an old CD.
The playlist conjures the summer chronicles of a nineteen-year-old me, and I am in the amplified swoon of a soul-wild love for a man who tastes like Crest toothpaste, fills my ears with Bon Iver lyrics, and gifts me calm, radical acceptance (he never teases me, never puts me down, and that’s the gold instructing me on what is a requirement in the next romantic partnership: unconditional support).
I’m nineteen and in the spin of a first love that will forever shift me into brighter and deeper understanding of my own heart and the heart of humanity. And the songs narrate the car rides to-and-from my first yoga classes, and all the radical joys and tough challenges that spring from stepping forward as an instructor.
The self-curated mix leaps from the Amelie soundtrack to the cheeky and clever Kate Nash and as Lupe Fiasco states for me to declare myself a Superstar, there’s a comet rush of love for the friends who summersaulted through those star-rich nights with me.
I bask in love for that young woman – the one who loves so completely, and wholeheartedly launched into teaching. I admire her bravery, her sincerity, her innocence, and her taste in music. There’s a lifetime of experience between that nineteen-year-old and me, and I envy at her wonder, mostly at her ability to be open to giving and receiving love. I awe at her spirituality, her faith, and her unwavering connection to the stars, and as I drive to the coffee shop, I think I just want to be the woman I use to be, and take her wisdom back into the present with me.
And as I sing-along to the soundtrack of my former self, I travel down streets that became mapped in familiarity during my first Austin summer, and a dense grief, like a low-hanging, summer thunderstorm that threatens to break, permeates the revisiting and tightens muscles and quickens my heartbeat.
I’m twenty-seven, and I replant my life in a city where my lizard-brain battles to perceive clearly. I’m twenty-seven and I grit through the crash of illusions of what I thought my life would be like here, mourn the passing of a woman I will not become here, and carefully befriend the woman I become instead. This is the summer of sweat, spring water, short stories, survival.
This is a summer self I now have the softening courage to catch and cradle. I turn up Beyonce’s “Halo” a little louder. I honor her grit through a breath-illumination of grace.
All of these women arrive with me to the coffee shop.
I pause to gather all the women I once was in an embrace that frees me to receive their unique wisdom relevant to current becoming.
I thank them for these soul-needed reminders: to express myself through creative style and spirited writing, to keep my heart open to love and to race forward into the messy glory of opportunities that let me explore professional, spark-joy curiosities. And especially remember the inherent strength that now rivers me forward into this summer self.
These women encourage me to trust and dance in the joy that life is extending to me.
And the vulnerability to be as I use to be unnerves me, but I choose to live in the exhilarating rush of life, and my former selves reassure me that I have all the inner resources I need to handle the waters of life. And when I look back at their stories, I feel no regrets. I was excruciatingly and miraculously alive through all those heat waves of love, loss, fear, sunlit beauty.
Receive, receive, receive.
So I breathe myself back to present embodiment. I turn off the playlist from another time. I let kindness cascade into twenty-nine-year-old skin, into a heart that is ready to share space with a goddess-like friend and be vibrantly attentive to the wonder that is this wildly hot bloom of summer.