I was never introduced to the sun properly, and maybe that’s why I never really liked it. I saw it for the first time when I was four years old, and not because I was kept in a closet during the years prior or anything like that, but because, as a young child, it never occurred to me to look straight into a powerful beam of light. Who knows what draws a child to finally lock eyes with the sun, but one day at a park in West Hollywood, my time came and I stared straight at it, entranced by its brightness. A Russian grandmother yelled, “Child! You are going blind! Look down at the sand!” I believed her because my head started to hurt, and when I looked back upon the earth, it never looked quite the same. Apparently, we need 20 minutes of direct sunlight each day to be happy. However, every time that I feel the sun creep over my skin, the only thing that I feel is dry. I feel the cells of my skin dying gruesome deaths, and I can hear the old woman’s thick voice warning me about it. I blame her for my fear.
I sit in the sun's light anyway, for I’m told that the glow that summer gives your skin is more fleeting than youth itself. I’m terrified of aging because I’ve lived a version of it so many times. For every warm and comfortable summer, there is a cold and barren winter just beyond the horizon. It is beloved only for its fleeting nature. I watch the flowers by my dad’s house open up to me, so vulnerable and unaware that, in a short three months, they’ll shrivel and freeze and I won’t even look their way. How could a young woman be naive to her inevitable demise? It’s as though each passing summer is a reminder that we should enjoy it while it lasts. Not just the warmth, but being young.
While I lay by the poolside of my friend's too-large estate, I don’t feel possessed by the spirit that I feel everyone expects me to have. The liveliness that I saw in the movies growing up with the beautiful, young, wild women, who seemed ignorant to the fears of the inevitable, is no part of my life at all. The viewer knows that these women will be worthless so disturbingly soon, and to watch them bask in the ignorance of what is yet to come is a thrill like no other. In just five years, this playful spirit will be sad, indicative of someone who couldn’t move on. The secret, however, is that these young women are not oblivious. The older I get, the more I realize that these girls know that it will one day come to an end. No woman is immune to Time’s subtle whisper in the back of her ear.
Perhaps, though, I’m not one of these women from the movies. The cheap beach chair that I’m sitting on is getting warmer, I’m bloated from seltzers, and the harsh early afternoon light does not reflect kindly upon the razor burn coating my inner thighs. The ripples in the pool glide slowly towards the end where my friend’s hopeless situationship is floating upon a small pool toy. He struggles to get to where he wants to go as he flaps his arms helplessly in an attempt to reach the brick edge. He seems so much weaker on the giraffe-shaped pool toy that he’s not as attractive now as when I first met him. This creature–the kind that I spend so much time thinking about and obsessing over–is really so small.
Don’t get me wrong. There are moments, of course, where I do feel this sense of freedom that summer grants us young women. For me, it's that empty bit of space between one school semester and the next where there is nothing but impermanence. My summer internship at a media company, whose name I can't spell, is entirely temporary. My childhood bedroom is bare of furniture or shitty high school art, and anything I could call my own lies in the houses of various friends across the country, sealed and ready for me to reopen once I move into my sophomore year dorm room that I have yet to see. I have nowhere to call home. I have no responsibilities, nothing to settle into, and even less to call my own. My life is not chaotic, only unstructured. Can other women, the ones that never get these summers of purgatory, have these truly romantic summers? I don’t think that they can.
I have a hard time understanding how anyone could romanticize this life because I’m not doing the whole ‘Hot Girl Summer’ thing right. I’m not exactly a flawless socialite with daddy’s money, only a girl with six jobs. Nevertheless, they are glamorous, fun, and appropriate summer jobs. I work as a farmers market vendor and a bougie ice cream shop cashier and a nanny and a hostess. I get tipped well and complimented on my outfits and asked out to dinner. During one Saturday morning at the farmers market, while I danced to the live music, the woman at the stall next to me said, “I just wish that I was young and beautiful like you, again.” I don’t know what she misses because I pray this isn’t my peak, but I am terrified that it only gets worse from here. I touch the razor burn on my bikini line, wondering if there is a product that can fix it for me.
I reflect on the night before when a guy from work took me on a date to the beach. It was sunset, and I wore a flowered, soft-pink bikini worth more than what’s in my bank account. My curly hair was tangled and puffy from the salt water, and as I carefully lit my cigarette, he told me that I reminded him of a painting. “Venus De Milo,” he said. I didn’t know who that was but when I looked up a picture, I thought she was entirely mediocre, and got offended. I blocked him once he dropped me off at home.
I think that what this all is supposed to be is a time to experience what we were promised but also forbidden from, as young girls. We were raised to be good but always with that subtle message that there’s nothing quite like a wild young woman. Hot Girl Summer is a controlled environment where we can be everything that people want from us but not stray too far. I can sleep with as many people as I’d like, but I will fall back in line at some point, get a steady nine-to-five, and have children at the correct age. It’s just another way to help young women to be everything at once. Free, but not so much so that they get tied up in the folds of nightlife so deeply that they are lost to the streets. It’s only a phase, and it is a girl that I will forget about in a few years’ time.
I get up from where I’m lying beside the pool and crouch next to a small bush by the edge, plunging my hands into the cold water. I squint my eyes, even though I’m wearing sunglasses, just to scowl at no one. The man that my friend has over, if I can even call him that, asks me what I’m thinking, so I tell him that there’s this guy I really like. He takes me stargazing and to nice meals and we stay out until three AM. However, as he holds me against the cold night air and I think about how right it all is, I can’t help but remember the millions of women, probably even Venus de Milo herself, who have experienced this exact same thing and felt the same way, and I’m reminded of how unextraordinary it all is. Every crazy risk that I’ve taken and substance that I’ve used is all so unspecial, nay, predictable. I explain that I’m just a manifestation of the cliche and that in a movie, my character could be subbed out for any actress and it wouldn’t change a thing. Exactly what I feel, so deep inside of me, has been written about time and time again throughout history because it doesn’t belong to me. My friend’s situationship just watches the ripples in the pool as I tell him this. “Wow, that’s crazy,” he says. I think that it’s the hardest he’s ever thought about anything.
I leave him in the pool by himself to relax, even though I’d be quite content to stay exactly where I am. The sun is beating down on my head and I’m not as scared of it now as I was just moments ago. I’m smothered in sunscreen but, all of a sudden, aging doesn’t scare me quite so much. When I think about how deeply meaningless my summer of fun is, I can’t wait to be an old woman, because that story isn’t written quite as much. I can’t guess what happens at the end.
