Summer Dreams
folly and youth
ribbons of eighty-five unfurl under my tires, scrolling through South Carolina,
back through my roots, climbing the thick, wooden trunk: sturdy, girth-invested, all the way up into my branches, finally leaving.
So what if I don’t remember swimming out to a boat, climbing aboard, and taking off for a private cove?
Or a night blurring down Broad Street in someone else’s limousine, cocaine and champagne making the night bright and bubbly?
I’ll climb the fountain after the concert, drink beer at Lucy’s grave, lay down on the fairway under the sprinklers, ask the Godfather of Soul for a favor (for a friend), get my groove on barefoot on the dance floor of your bar (pull shards of Budweiser bottles from the soles of my feet decades later), wear my sunglasses home, and drive to the beach on half a tank of gas.
About the Creator
Harper Lewis
I'm a weirdo nerd who’s extremely subversive. I like rocks, incense, and witchy stuff. Intrusive rhyme bothers me. Some of my fiction might have provoked divorce proceedings in another state.😈
MA English literature, College of Charleston
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Comments (1)
That turn from “ribbons of eighty-five unfurl under my tires” into the way memory just shrugs and keeps going really stuck with me — like you’re admitting the gaps without apologizing for them. The image of drinking beer at Lucy’s grave and then later pulling Budweiser shards out of your feet decades on felt weirdly tender to me, like joy and damage sharing the same shelf. It made me think about how some summers only make sense in fragments, not full stories. Do you feel like the forgetting is part of what keeps those moments alive, or does it ever bother you that you can’t hold onto all of it?