That Summer Feeling

by Bridget Morrissey

I, however, wore my struggles like Girl Scout badges. My divorce was something I found myself mentioning as often as possible, as if the more I talked about it, the less painful it would feel.

No one could ever judge me too harshly if I judged myself harder and louder than they’d ever dare.

Her own hands had such a tight grip on me in return that the pressure of it almost made me cry. It had been so long since anyone had held me in that way. It made me feel like I was fragile and worth protecting.

“It’s you and me,” she said. “Against everyone else.” “You and me,” I echoed.

I opened my mouth to speak. No sound came out. Instead, I fainted. Right at the feet of the man of my dreams.

I lived my life in waiting mode, holding out for Ethan’s return.

Somehow Stevie, a stranger by all metrics, kept anticipating the paths I was going to take and clearing away any debris that might make me fall on my face. I didn’t know how to feel like I’d earned that when all I’d done in return was talk to her.

I rested my head against his sweaty torso, combing the crowd for Stevie one last time. I’d started doubting my memory of her face. I needed to look at her longer so I could never lose track of her again.

“You’re always welcome wherever I am.” My heart ached harder. As if little construction workers lived in there and they’d started building something new without a permit.

“If anyone in the world was going to get me across that course, it would’ve been Stevie. So if this is a competition between you two, she wins. Every time.”

Allison leaned in, dropping her voice to a staged whisper. “Is she avoiding me?” Stevie herself had told me nothing about Allison, so I was well within my rights to pretend I had no idea who she was. “She didn’t say anything. Do you guys know each other or something?” Allison had to laugh. When my face didn’t break as she expected, she went quiet. She couldn’t read me, which made me feel wild with power. I’d never tried to be anything but nice to a complete stranger before. This wasn’t me being mean either. I didn’t know what I was being, but it worked all the same, unsettling her in the exact way I hoped it would.

At that, the band started playing “Hoedown Throwdown” from Hannah Montana: The Movie. “This is what you requested over and over?” Stevie asked me. She was genuinely on the verge of falling to the floor in amusement.

She made me afraid to blink, because to miss even a single second was to miss something revelatory.

Before Stevie, there had been an obvious set of parameters to my romantic attractions. I liked men because that was what I’d always seen as the obvious choice for me to make. I knew a lot of queer people, and the certainty with which they’d decided upon their queerness intimidated me. They spoke of knowing it since childhood, understanding they were different before they could even articulate how. I never felt like I knew anything about myself for certain.

“The older you get, the more you realize there’s a damn good reason to be afraid of just about every single thing in life. So you might as well do it all, because the fear sure doesn’t care either way.”

God, her face was perfect. Even when I could hardly see it. I knew the sweet slope of her nose. The hollows of her cheeks. Her smile lines, crinkling in the corners of her mouth when she grinned. I’d been so flustered when she found me, I hadn’t processed the honor of witnessing her. Now the heat of her sunshine spread through me, moving like a fast-acting drug, waking up every nerve in my body.

I’ve always been all-or-nothing like that. I wanted the earth scorched.”

“The life I used to want for myself was just a life that fit what I thought the world expected of me. I got a degree in communications, because that made sense. I married my college sweetheart. Because that made sense. I realize now that none of it actually made sense to me. It just made sense on paper. And it’s taken me way too long to see that those are different things. It’s like I’ve been in hibernation, and suddenly I’m awake. I’m alive. And I don’t know what to do with myself.”

I had never felt such a comfort with my desire. It was easy in the way all good things often were, like when you found yourself wondering why you didn’t always take a nice walk on a beautiful day or cook your favorite meal for dinner. Why didn’t I always wake up with the sun to kiss Stevie Magnusson on the dock of the lake? In that moment, it felt not only possible to do this every morning of my life, but necessary.

The best gift you can give yourself is permission to keep figuring shit out, no matter how messy it is.

“I used to spend a lot of time imagining my future,” I told her. “I’d make up little scenarios with people as soon as I met them. What would we eat for lunch on a rainy day? If we went to Disneyland together, what ride would we go on first? That kind of thing. I loved to do it. It made me believe that I could one day have so much more than I did. And then I got married for real. I lived out all my scenarios. Ethan and I used to make quesadillas on rainy days. We had Disneyland season passes, and we always started on Indiana Jones. It all looked lovely in the scrapbook of my mind. But the moments between didn’t fill me. That’s where the real love lives. And I never paid enough attention to that. I was too busy chasing milestones that didn’t matter.”