Let Me Count the Ways

oh july! how i love thee eternally, for you always remind of summer vacations, even though i’m a working stiff now who can’t take summers off anymore like i could when i was middle-school-aged and carefree, and spent days at the mall with my friends, hanging out in arcades and making eyes at boys — “he was totally checking me out!!” — while wearing blue-and-yellow eye shadow stolen from my mom’s makeup kit, applied haphazardly and looking quite garish, though it didn’t matter because it was eye shadow that i considered myself old enough to wear, forget what my mom had to say. plus she would never find out anyway because i would lick my palm and remove all traces of the color on my way home in time for dinner.

oh july! how you and i go way back, way way back, almost as far as the stone age, or maybe it was 1988, the same summer i turned 12, got my first period and became obsessed with “Days of Our Lives” and man, wasn’t Bo the most handsome man ever with that beard? he had a boat on the show that he named The Fancy Face and i was sure he meant me despite the fact that my face was fancy with pimples at the time, but i knew he would still love me unconditionally because he still loved his girlfriend on the show who one day woke up to find herself deaf and even forgave his mother for not telling him that his archnemesis across town was actually his father from a tryst his mother had 30 years back during a hot Salem summer, i’m sure it was in july.

oh july! do you remember that one time we were hanging out with my cousin Gitella, i was probably 9, and we were giggling and trying to see who could fart the loudest, and she accidentally fell off a bar stool and onto the floor, which somehow caused a giant wall mirror to fall on top of her and shatter into a million little pieces, pieces that wedged into her skin and made her bleed like something out of a horror film, streaks and streaks of blood down her freckled face. she was crying and i was crying, worried about those seven years of bad luck we would surely have. then a neighbor came to our rescue and helped clean up our mess and reassured us that everything would be ok, though i knew it wouldn’t be ok because my father was going to kill me when he got home, but my mom came home first and i begged her on hands and knees, crying hysterically, not to say anything to my dad. and she was a champ and didn’t say anything and instead took the blame for the whole thing, saying she closed the screen door too hard and the mirror fell because of that, nevermind all the bandages on my cousin’s face, they were because of something else. and he bought it.

oh july, do you remember me? because i remember you.