Pretty Things In Summer

[Sensitive Content - Implied homophobia]

I was young when a man warned me about pretty things. It was half-way through a road trip when my family stopped at an almost ghost town. By the street perched a house, advertising its collection of antiques: the memories of so many people, so many lives now gone. While Mum looked at a rusty wheelbarrow, I found a clock beneath a glass dome, wedged between a photo frame more nails than timber and a collection of silverish spoons. With painted gold plastic and an art deco face, it was the most beautiful treasure I’ve ever seen. I carried it out, carried it gently as if it were a divine artefact, and laid it on the counter. The man by the till was disappointed by what I found.

“That’s two dollars,” he said. “It doesn’t work, you know, and we don’t give refunds.”

“It’s pretty,” I said, with the defiance of a child who knows she’s wrong, but persists nonetheless. What did it matter if it was broken? A two-dollar coin sat in my eager, outstretched hand.

“Pretty things shouldn’t always be trusted.”

---

In every respect, she was the very definition of pretty, with a delightful personality and a mind of gold, her eyes like river stones. Down her lips drew a scar from a Christmas day accident. It rippled when she smiled, and she always smiled. Never had I met someone so magnetic: equal parts wonderfully, painfully human, and an unknowable, ethereal creature.

On a summer’s day we laid beneath verdant canopies at a celebratory picnic. Friends, food, games and laughter on the eve of our graduation from childhood to freedom. She was sprawled in the grass, giggling alongside the others. I tried to pay her no more mind than I did anyone else. But I craved the contact of our legs pressing together, of her hands catching mine so readily. By the end I felt like I was drowning. Drowning or intoxicating. I headed home, euphoric, only to turn around and find her racing after me, catching me just as I left the park.

She blurted out: “Do you want to go out for coffee sometime? Like on a date?”

---

In the nights leading to Saturday, I barely slept. For hours I stared at the darkened ceiling, listening to echoes of our every conversation. Had I always been so delighted by her? Yes, whispered my memories, but you were just too blind to see. There was finally a name to the adoration I felt. When the day arrived at last, I spent two hours alone fussing over my appearance. Eyeliner on? No, it didn’t look right: eyeliner off. A skirt or my favourite summer dress? The very prospect of being worthy of her attention sent me panicking. Anxiety writhed in my stomach, a colossal, sickening mess. I stared at my pallid reflection, trying to breathe, trying to tame the child grin on my face.

Before lunch we met at the park, wandering into its wilder corners in a nervous silence. Nothing was said. I was overcome by joy and she just beamed, a little lop-sided. Again and again she couldn’t fit words past her smile. I extended my hand, offering one of the mangoes I brought from the market.

“I think mangoes are my love language,” I managed. Our first date and neither could say hello. I wished I said something witty, something profound that would linger in her mind for years.

But she laughed nonetheless, then a great blush caught her skin alight as she accepted the offer. Delight bloomed in my chest. Again. I knew I would do anything to hear her laugh again.

Then we sank into the companionship we had shared for years, remembering how easily we enjoyed one another’s company. My stress vanished, replaced with contentment. Half-an-hour passed and we had already discussed a thousand things: our lives, our fears, our dreams, a thousand musings. A thousand things I’d never shared before.

I have always been slow to emotions. The rising of reactions burn beneath my skin, never bursting. No emotions shown, no word spoken, that I have not allowed, keeping myself instead in a petrified state of impassive self-defence. We were a strange dichotomy. Where offering details of my life made me nauseous, she was a vibrant tapestry of living. Always she spoke, saying anything and everything, even if only empty ears listened.

No emotions shown, no words spoken that I did not first allow. But she was drawing unbidden truths from me. All too often as of late my emotions escaped me, running wild. I wish I could stop smiling so I might at least say something.

“You shouldn’t trust me. I’m a liar,” I said in a lull of dialogue. She didn’t recoil. Hate me, I desperately wanted, I need you to hate me. Distrust me with the same eyes as my own mother.

Rather, she asked, “have you ever lied to me?”

Fearfully, I searched for the lies: the words like waterfalls slipping from my tongue to protect myself. I lied to my mother not hours ago. I lied about where I was and who I was with. I lied! I lied! Could Mum ever know I sat among wildgrasses, falling for a girl with the eyes of a siren? I lied as easily as breathing. What a dangerous person I was to care for. Yet not a single lie I could remember telling this girl over the three years of our friendship.

“I don’t think so.” Somehow, in the endless melody of her conversations, I couldn’t fear my own responses. There was no room for anxiety to lay its heavy head.

By now, her mango was desecrated. It was a glamourless, messy way to eat. Juice traced down my finger where my nail impaled flesh. The stickiness made my skin crawl. She popped the seed into her mouth and I stifled a gasp. She just beamed at me, her cheeks bulging as she suckled the last of the mango.

“Please don’t sneeze,” I said. For a moment I was terrified I would need to call an ambulance when she snorted, but thankfully she spat the seed out seconds later.

“Why haven’t you?”

Lost to our discussion, I watched how the sunlight caught on her lips. A fresh red blemished the corners of her mouth where she chewed through the skin. She cleared her throat, then giggled at my embarrassment. I stared stubbornly at my mango, scolding myself.

“Why haven’t you lied to me?” She repeated, more gentle this time.

I sank my teeth into the fruit, relishing in the burst of flavour. Juice slipped down my chin. “I don’t really know. I’m not scared when I’m with you.” And how terrifying that realisation is.

She shuffled closer, closing the distance between us in the wildgrass; a dandelion peeked out from beneath her knee. What would I wish for, if I blew its feathered seeds across the grass? I wrestled with my breaths to stay calm when her hand found my leg. Had her eyes always been so bright? Not a romantic shade of brown or piercing blue, but a muddy mix of far too many colours. They were the most beautiful eyes in the world.

“Can I kiss you?”

My breath seized in my throat, and I froze. Was it too soon? Were we pulling each other skyward only to fall? Were we doomed? Looking at her, expectant and hopeful, I was afraid of myself. What if I was fooling myself and my affection for her was false? I couldn’t bear the thought of hurting her.

She waited for a moment then withdrew. Shame burned her face. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” Her words were disjointed, close to crying.

And in an instance, I knew what I would wish for. A white thread was dislodged from the dandelion, fluttering down to rest on my ankle. "— No! Please, I’d like that very much.”

She leaned back into me, and, in a moment that lasted eternity and all too brief, we kissed. Her lips tasted like mango and cherry-flavoured lip balm and a little like blood. I would never eat mango again without thinking of this. Her fingers held my chin, and we melted together: messy, alive and divine.

---

“Your clock doesn’t work.” I was half asleep on her chest when she spoke. I felt the rumble of her words deep within my own body, felt the rise and fall of her breathing like a tree shifting in the wind.

Afternoon sunlight gathered on the gold, making the clock almost painful to look at. “It never has,” I mumbled. The summer heat weighed on me, coaxing me back to sleep.

“Why’d you buy something broken?” She touched the pendulum tentatively, as if afraid it would snap. It might have done: the plastic was brittle enough.

“I don’t really know. It was such a long time ago. I liked it, I guess.” I sat upright, a little regretfully. I thought of the jar of rocks she kept by her bed, half populated by semi-precious stones and half strange pieces of pavement that caught her eye, ravenlike. Already my own nightstand languished beneath the innumerous crystal gifts she had given me. At the forefront was a banded agate the same blue as my eyes. “What about you? Why do you collect trinkets and oddities?”

“Some are just pretty, others are memories.” She said. I wanted her to keep talking; I wanted to hear a hundred stories. Her entire history, or the dinner she ate last night, anything, so long as the melody of her voice continued.

“What do you mean?

“On our second date, I picked up a pebble from outside the theatre. Now, whenever I look at it, I’ll think about that day. That ametrine I got you? It reminds me of graduation night. Others make me think of people or places. They’re like photographs. Does the clock have a memory attached to it?”

“A strange one.” I told her about a summer so long ago in a decrepit antique shop. "It's a good representation of who I am, I suppose."

---

Technically we were meant to be at the house with the others, drowning in music, dance and beer. A friend invited the two of us to the property he rented for his eighteenth: an old farmstead barely fit for living. Fourteen guests were stuffed inside, delirious with booze and anticipation. I was excited for the weekend, except the party had already become so loud that I couldn’t bear to stay. Music thrummed deep and piercing in my head: my ears rang.

It was my favourite part of the season, just when summer began to wear itself out and the trees dreamed in orange, not green and brown. With her hand in mine, we raced from the house down towards the bush where the farm’s boundary dipped into a lake. The year had been kind — the first mercy in a decade — and the lake was swollen with water. All around us, the fields were luminious with canola.

Without hesitation, my feet disappeared into the hazy murk of water. Something unseen brushed against my ankle. Bubbles followed its procession further into the lake. I waded in deeper, calm at last as the water soothed my convulsing, sharp thoughts. She followed me in, pulling off her clothes so hastily I could barely turn my head in time for modesty. My cheeks burned as I tried to avert my gaze from her bare skin. She stubbornly followed my eyes.

“You can’t exactly go swimming fully dressed.”

That wasn’t true. Often in summer, so overwhelmed by heat, my brothers and I would jump into the pool fully clothed. I was half-tempted to commit, just to make her laugh — anything to make her laugh — but I didn’t relish the idea of returning to the house sopping wet. I surrendered, returning to the bank to add my damp skirt and t-shirt to her discarded pile. I didn’t know where to put my hands, thinking of how my mother held her stomach when she felt insecure. The girl descended into the lake, approaching me. She stopped my hands from shielding my chest.

She whispered, “you’re really pretty.” Slowly, she laid a kiss on each palm.

About to reply, I froze. Freckles like split stars across her collar bone caught my attention.

“It’s the big dipper,” she traced her fingers over the marks in a fluid, confident line.

I sputtered out laughing when I realised she was right. She grinned. Of course she would have a constellation on her skin. I couldn’t think of anything more fitting.

---

Summer died.

The season is such an unpleasant time of year. I grow sick of heat exhaustion, of sweat and discomfort, and days and days without an end. When finally the green shrivels into brown and the cicadas retire, I can relax. But for the first time, I would miss summer. This summer I was alive in a way I had never been before. This time I gave a heartbroken goodbye; Goodbye to cherries and mangoes, murky lakes and the sanctuary of trees and the inescapable weariness that made for heavy naps in the afternoon. A goodbye and a wobbly thank you. In summer there was a girl more naiad than human. Perhaps she was a dream. She taught me to savour the taste of summer on my tongue, on my skin: To taste mango in her kisses and cherry stained lips, her body against mine as we waded into the depths of water. She taught me to see summer in a thousand new colours and a thousand new ways.

But March arrived and summer was dead.

She appeared at my window, standing among the dreary roses. Autumn didn’t look quite as lovely on her as summer did. There was a sadness in her eyes I had never seen before. There was no smile this time, leaving a haunting absence in its wake. “I’m moving away,” she said when I leaned outside.

“What?”

“My Mum got a job in Sydney, so we have to go.”

“We could still try . . .” My plea puttered out. We both knew it wouldn’t work: neither wanted a half-hearted long-distance relationship to spoil our ephemeral memories.

“You’re the best person I’ve ever met. Thank you for everything,” she whispered. She didn’t say goodbye: I didn’t want her to. That would be too final. The tears gathering on her eyelashes hurt too much to see.

And that was it. We ended as unexpectedly as we began. Summer had swelled to its grandeur with weeks of an ineffable life, and now it collapsed into Autumn. All I had left was to satiate my loneliness with fantastical thoughts of her. In grief I turned back to our time together, combing it over and over for gold dust. And I began to remember her less and less as a person and more a passing miracle.

It was a cruel thing to do.

---

I have tried over and over again to fix the clock: slipping nails into plastic gears that weren’t even made to last. Once or twice a slow, out-of-time, ticking filled my room, but it never lasted longer than a few weeks. After tinkering for so long, some of the pieces had splintered. That was it. The clock could be nothing more than a worthless ornament.

---

A year, and summer returned. The fields were dry, starved by a growing drought. The air was wretched, with a thickness too hard to breathe. It was a summer far more familiar than its predecessor.

Except, she returned to my life and suddenly nothing made sense again. I opened the door to a stranger. There stood a girl, my half-friend, half-momentary-lover, who had left and become nothing. She was changed: in no great way, just the gentle differences a year makes. I’d forgotten how colourful her eyes were. A new tattoo peeked out from her collar. I guess I had changed too.

“Who is it?” Mum called.

“A friend.” I don’t know.

“It’s good to see you,” she said. Discomfort cast a long shadow over her words.

“Come in.” What I meant was: you shouldn’t have come back. You shouldn’t have trusted me with our memories. I’ve remembered you in a way one should only in obituaries: a kind of love proper only when the beloved it lost. You should have stayed lost to me. I destroyed you the way I did the clock, breaking it piece by piece, trying to force it to be something more. We entered my bedroom, and immediately, she looked at the broken thing. Tentatively, she picked up a cog from beside it, the latest casualty of my idle fiddling.

“Why are you here?” I knew how quickly I would fall for her smile. With each minute passing it was almost inevitable.

“I’m back in town for a bit.”

That wasn’t what I meant. I waited.

“I missed you,” she said simply. I felt a wound open in my heart, hungering for the old comfort of her company. It was humiliating, how quickly my mind surrendered to her.

She lowered her head and turned for the door, saying: “I’m sorry for intruding.”

And everything returned to me: mango trickling down her chin, words soaked in kindness and wonder, the safety I felt, her sweet-sounding laughter. How she made me feel pretty and loved and seen, seen so tenderly and vulnerable. And I knew she was too good to lose again.

“Wait!” I burst, “do you want to go out for a coffee?”