Summer Love
Summer has arrived. Sweat gathers in my creases; long, hazy days bleed into hot nights. At the wine bar, with my best friend, we sip glasses of cold white wine and dip shreds of buttered bread into olive oil. It is sunset and the sky has split open like wounded skin. My whole body feels weightless, as if it is not my body at all, but part of the earth itself. I slip my feet out of my sandals and imagine I can feel the earth’s core throbbing beneath my bare toes. I experience a moment of perfect contentment. Is this what love feels like? I wonder. Is this what it is to be loved, this feeling of complete understanding—of your body, the world, the life you will live inside of both?
I have been thinking a lot about romantic love. I haven’t been in a real relationship since I was sixteen. This relationship lasted six months, three of which were spent in Covid lockdown. Apart from our mutual desire to be in a relationship—because all of our friends were in them—we didn’t have any common interests. We spent our dates kissing in the backs of movie theatres. He would move his tongue around inside my mouth in a way that made me nauseous. I didn’t desire his body the way I knew I was supposed to. He broke up with me via text and I felt only a vague sense of frustration at having been broken up with, when I had always imagined I would be the person performing the breaking up.
It is not that opportunities to establish a romantic relationship have been unavailable to me. A month ago, I downloaded a dating app on my phone. Creating an account on the app involved selecting a series of ‘conversation prompts’ for potential boyfriends to ‘engage with’. The options were hilariously puerile: What is your ideal first date? What is your favourite book? Supposedly, these inane questions lead to real relationships and, presumably, to marriage and children. That human life could be created out of such conditions seemed totally absurd to me. When I deleted the app, I experienced a fleeting sense of intellectual triumph. But about what? Before the era of dating apps, intimacy between people was equally engineered. Marriages were arranged all the time. The romantic options afforded to women weren’t any better than they are now, often far worse. In deleting the dating app, I had achieved nothing at all, really.
In the evenings I go for long walks by the river, squinting into the dying sunlight. The water crinkles like foil; the air smells of sunscreen and dry grass. In a nearby park, couples sit on picnic blankets, eating slices of pizza out of cardboard boxes. Watching them, I feel withered, as if my whole body has been drained of blood. I fear the obligations created by relationships, the time and effort required to make love last. Last year, I went on a picnic date with a boy in one my university classes. His favourite books, most-played songs and political beliefs were all the same as mine. We were a perfect match, as they say. But when he tried to kiss me, pressing his warm hand to my cheek and sliding his leg over mine, my body turned cold, shaky. I stammered that I felt sick and wanted to go home. I liked the boy, but I did not want to be his girlfriend. I did not want to text him good night or buy him birthday presents or tell him I loved him. After all, most people consider romance an important, perhaps essential, aspect of human life, but it seemed I did not. I worried that my feelings seemed abnormal, maybe even disturbing.
I close my eyes and turn my head to where the sun is about to sink beneath the horizon. Bright light probes my eyelids, exposing the blood vessels inside my thin, tender flesh. I turn around, open my eyes. A couple—my age, perhaps younger—is folding their picnic blanket and packing leftover food into plastic bags. Before they leave, they kiss, deeply, fervently. My bones feel flimsy, like pieces of plastic. Am I somehow less human than others because I am failing to participate in, even actively avoiding, a romantic relationship? Or not less human, necessarily, but less capable of performing the core functions that human beings are designed to perform? But isn’t that what people say about women who choose not to have children—that they are denying themselves a vital component of the human experience and are therefore inferior to women who do participate in that experience? And I know this proposition is incorrect, because there are many women without children who live rich and meaningful lives, who don’t have children to enable themselves to live rich and meaningful lives.
I cook carbonara while listening to Adrienne Lenker’s ‘Free Treasure’ on repeat. Her lyrics—strikingly tender, almost slippery with rhythm—describe a longing for love that has been satisfied; a desperate hunger now satiated. I suppress a sudden urge to weep. Whenever I listen to this song, I imagine a faceless couple kneading pasta dough in a candlelit kitchen, sharing a bottle of wine. Occasionally, this image recurs in my dreams, and I wake with heavy limbs, my heart twisting feebly inside my chest.
I type the details of my dream into a dream interpretation website. The website tells me the presence of a man and woman working together in the kitchen suggests themes of partnership and reveals a desire for teamwork in my waking life. I blink at my laptop screen, feeling laughably adolescent.
The following night, when I repeat the details of the dream to best friend, she says it reveals my desire to experience love without its associated obligations. You think of love as an abstract idea, not as a material reality, she tells me.
I suspect she is right; I do not want to be the woman in my dream. I want to inhabit the brief moment in which she is drunk, and her hands are sticky with dough, and her lover wraps his big arms around her body. What I desire is purely aesthetic, an image of a life rather than the life itself. How can I learn to accept love as a material reality? I ask my friend. You don’t have to, she says. As long as you can eat pasta and drink wine, the man is irrelevant.
Walking by the river in the evenings, I repeat my best friend’s words under my breath. I sit in the park and watch the sun collapse beneath the horizon. You don’t have to be in love, I remind myself. As long as you can eat pasta and drink wine, the man is irrelevant.
Summer gives way to autumn. The nights come quickly; I walk home beneath a star smudged sky, the air thin and sharp.
At the wine bar on a Saturday afternoon, I share an enormous cheese platter with old friends: camembert and brie, gouda and blue. Soaked in golden light, we giggle over tall glasses of champagne. A group of old women in long, floral dresses and worn sandals amble along the footpath, carrying paper grocery bags. They laugh loudly, showing all their teeth. I experience an overwhelming sense of companionship, even though I don’t know any of them personally and never will.
I smudge a large piece of blue cheese across a fruit cracker and take a bite. The cheese melts on my tongue, fills my mouth with warmth. I am so hungry, I realise as the cracker crumbles between my teeth. My friends laugh and follow suit. Overhead, the sun shines on.
Lara Kenny is a writer based in Meanjin/Brisbane. She is currently an Arts/Law student majoring in English Literature. You can find her work in Jacaranda Journal. (She/Her)
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