Leftovers from a summer

The summer was supposed to taste like mango juice on sticky fingers, like pool water scrubbing off all the bullshit we’d been carrying all year. It was supposed to feel like a reset. But it never showed up like that. Instead it crawled in through the dog’s infected ear canal, pulsing with pus and heat and that sour, dirt-brown stench of something festering behind a door no one opens anymore.

June began halo-spun with a syllabus of serotonin. I had finally shaved my legs and stopped bleeding during it. The sky unzipped for me and through it came the rash. A hot pink bloom on the inside of my thigh like God had pressed His sweaty thumbprint there. Then the AC broke. The neighbor’s kid started screaming “I love Satan” every time the ice cream truck passed. I tried to love that too. Tried to see the whimsy in the noise. I didn’t.

The days unfurled like used tissues. I layed on the floor because it was cooler than the bed, and the bed had started to smell like my skin had given up on being flesh and was becoming something else. I peeled my underwear off and it made a sound like Velcro.

There was a plan. A lake house. Some college friends. Floaties shaped like fruit. But the car got impounded when my cousin tried to hotbox it with oregano and Flonase. I didn’t go anywhere (I ghosted everyone else then I did the same to myself). Instead I grew moss on my teeth and read books about parasites. I ate cold corn straight from the can.

In July, I texted someone I shouldn’t have. I called it nostalgia but it was really a roach-scuttling impulse, a need to press my face against something that had already tried to eat me alive. They responded with “new number, who this.” I screenshot it and posted it with a caption like “LOL summer vibes.” No one liked it.

I kept smelling vinegar even though nothing in the fridge had vinegar in it. I scrubbed the kitchen floor with my own sock and cried about it harder than last year’s miscarriage. I baptized my insides with an entire bottle of wine. I stared at the hiccuping stars. The flames in the insect repelling candles were anemic. Mosquitoes orbited them like tiny ghosts. I sat in silence while the heat choked itself out.

August came in on a stretcher. The heat had stopped being sexy and now it was just moldy. My armpits were experiments in fermentation. I thought about buying a swimsuit and didn’t. I thought about dying and didn’t.

There was one evening I tried to summon meaning. I went outside barefoot and touched the dirt. It squelched. I whispered “please” or maybe “fuck” into the sky, but the moon was too busy molting to care.

Another day I opened the window and screamed my own name. Just once. My throat hurt for two days after. No one screamed back. That night, a firefly landed on my knee. It lit up once and then died.

I whispered thank you anyway.

By the time September tiptoed in, there were mushrooms growing in my bathroom. I named them. I loved them more than I ever loved myself.

I went to bed that month with a fever and woke up with three new moles and the sudden awareness that my body was a dying planet, a small Earth trembling under its own weather.

It was supposed to be summer. It turned out to be a slow decomposition. But I’m still here, aren’t I? Barefoot and rashy and sobbing into the night-sweat-soaked mattress. A sea-sick creature. A crust. Another summer survived.