Letters to June // 05

Throughout the month of June Boshemia will be publishing letters addressed to the most romantic month of the year. This letter is from Taylor Wear.

My dearest June,

You are the stubborn, petulant daughter of the summer months, precocious and freckle-nosed, limber arms crossed over your little chest, one dusty sneakered foot in front of the other. You flatly refuse to be tamed--insist on everything you want.

You come around, June, but always in secret, and only in balmy, seductive weather. The dreary conscientiousness of wintertime just isn’t your scene. Give you barefoot nights, lightning bugs, lemonade. You appear in a firework, sit on my shoulder for a wondrous thirty days, a voice, in between smacks of bubblegum, that I can only describe as a raspy schoolgirl falsetto telling me to geez, just do it already .

You blow a saccharine bubble, it pops in my ear, and I make yet another poor, marvelous decision.

What on God’s green earth am I going to do with you?

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Photo by Issara Willenskomer

***

Theo is forty-four, give or take a couple months. He has a job that requires him to travel a lot, one that you imagine involves a lot of sitting around in boardrooms and an environment of almost oppressive masculinity. He is what we call an unfair human specimen, or maybe descendant of fucking Adonis. Broad-shouldered and forest-eyed, he has absolutely no business looking at me. But that he does, for whatever reason, and goodness does it feel nice, if a little torrid, clandestine. He tilts my guileless chin up with one hand, says "I think I am going to kiss you now".

Enter you, June, stage left: Geez, just do it already. What are you, stupid?

True to stupid form, I do what I want anyway. I kiss him back, and holy shit, life is fireworks and hands up skirts. Life is unabashedly sexy and desperately fun. He takes his time, the same way dusk takes its time, lazily creeping up on the horizon from the west. Sprawling out over blue sky the way we’re sprawled out over grey cotton sheets. Right now life is brief and wonderful, like all suitably bad decisions are.

Anything for you, June.

* * *

You know what the trouble is with you, June? You’re never around for very long. Out the door as quickly as you came in. Leave your dolls strewn on the floor, the popsicle stick stuck to the arm of the sofa. You aren’t there when the weight, the gravity settles in, when it stops being fun and starts getting heavy; when I learn more about Theo’s life, all the dark parts, and that awful night he frantically whispered that he loved me; when

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I grapple with the hypothesis that even though now it might be me, it could potentially be anyone else. Who is going to listen to me now, June? Matronly, spinster November?

What on earth did you expect, getting involved with girls like that. Serves you right.

In spite of everything, I still don’t care.

* * *

Because truth be told, June, I still feel you even after you’re gone for a while, deep into the throes of this Indian summer. A subtle reminder that hardly anything lasts forever, but plenty things revolve, how the moon rolls around the ocean and brings the waves back to lap and cradle at my feet. Your steady resolve, your unwavering spunk. You remind me that soon, just maybe, I will be greeted with desert skies and sweet escape, and Theo and his boardroom job and his Art-Deco kitchen will stay behind. And I will find another adventure, another Theo, another rush of adrenaline, another moment of brief and beautiful wonder.

You smack your gum. October’s coming, dummy. Let’s blow this popsicle stand.

Until then, June. See you next year.

All my love,

T.