Summer air and peeling burned arms around sun cream that we put on in the shape of smiley faces, and Gráinne’s head on my shoulders in the middle of the beginning of summer. It was before we got our teeth around the heat, and before we sort of knew what the shape of the months looked like for us. We decided to walk through the woods before our dinner, too hot and shining red to stay put on our Thomas the Tank Engine blankets in the back garden. Something in my chest and behind my eyes moves remembering us then, the ones I chose, my best friends.
If I could put it in words I would, but I won’t, because I don’t know how to articulate hair stiff with salt that won’t brush out, the look in flushed faces and bright eyes outside churches, the turning of the weather, lamp posts nearly, almost hidden behind flower bushes in the daylight. I don’t know how to do the feeling justice in the way I want to, but the air this summer was different on my skin and my mind.
We walked down past the farm gates in Mr Price fairy wings Zoë bought, that I keep on my desk chair, because I don’t really know if I’ll use them again but don’t want to give them to my sister. Sometimes they fall off it and I stand on them by accident. There might have been other walkers but if there were I don’t remember it now, because we were in a bubble of soft happiness.
The whole summer seems to condense into that afternoon, where we went past the pond entirely covered with green gunk, when we found trees good for sitting in and took pictures, when we tried and failed to swing off and fix an old rope swing with nothing on the end to sit on. I feel like it was the beginning of something I didn’t really understand then, but I know now it was love I felt in the June sunshine.
Later now, not even that much older or wiser, I remember the holidays with affection and a sick stomach and a full heart.
I think it was a change in how I looked at myself in the mirror, how I watched other people. I spent so much time wishing for what I finally got that year, a proper coming of age, where everything felt like the films I watch in half-hour blocks one night a week with my dad. Everything felt like the beginning of a whole world, or the end of one.
We moved back to the house after that, Gráinne taking off her shoes and getting dirty feet to try and avoid getting blisters she had already from walking there. We stopped at a playground that was actually closed, because they weren’t finished the tarmac in there, but we bounced on one of those trampolines set in the ground for a good fifteen minutes until we decided to leave, back home to pizza and conversations about WandaVision on the couch. I felt like nothing could touch us.
The feeling I was chasing from watching it in other people, on film, reading about it, was being content, and I felt it then, realising there was no way to rush it. Everything was new, and growing up was easy in sunlight and Christine and The Queens at the beach, taking Polaroids. It still is now, but autumn this year showed me that all moments have their places in time, and that one felt like a starting point. Things grow, and continue, and I know more than I did before. I will never be finished growing up like I thought I would be, because what is grown up supposed to be? I know more now than I did before and I still have more life to live. Coming of age is just coming along until you look at yourself in a different way.
One part of the day sticks out, walking back through the woods. I walked ahead, running, and I turned around and I saw them there, walking with me, covered in burns, blisters, glitter, and sun and quiet forest making laughter seem louder. Before we knew things we do now, before things we don’t know at all. I was happy to grow up with them then, and I am now, with more in our number, love increasing knowing no seasons, growing up with us now too. We knew nothing and everything that we could and I would give anything to do it again.
In summer air, the sight of us, and the sounds of life beginning, ending, and continuing.
