All The Metaphors You’ll Ever Need For The Summer
Summer is the season you most want to write about. The one that makes you want to cut yourself in half, and then to cut those halves in half, and to cut those into eighths, so you’re small and big enough to absorb all the juice that’s happening now.
Summer is freaking me out. People are spinning around, man, like figure skaters, and I don’t know when they’ll all shoot out, centrifugally, leaving me alone with the cockroaches (who seem to be doing fine), stuck in this erection of a season.
Summer is gangly pink limbs wandering out of padlocked boxes.
Summer is the sky being matte periwinkle. The sky is sweaty. Fireflies start lifting themselves out of the places where they’ve lived for the past eight months, drunk and oddly horny. Still, you’re always surprised by how many images an insect can carry. When she was little, my grandmother used to tear off the lighted parts of fireflies and put them under her fingernails.
Summer is when we realize all of a sudden that we have always had too much skin.
Summer is when old bodies from high school walk past you in SoHo, screaming your name, vocal cords slamming together and making you jerk your head around on Prince St. to realize you are both chubby ghosts, sweaty ghosts in damp underpants.
Summer is the almost inaudible manufacture of nostalgia that happens when the sun gets down on its knees at around 8:30. The looking for stars in the sky and finding them only in the designs on the sidewalk made by sparks of black gum, so repulsive you want to lick them.
Summer is your right brain coming out of its coma, telling you to look for the hidden calligraphic messages written in body hair.
You can feel your pubes more than in any other season, and it feels hot. The feel of it makes memories happen, tickling your amygdala.
Summer is when you think of your mom and dad, happy hunchbacks, teeth changing color and dancing, both of them fumbling with the tomatoes in the backyard garden and getting closer to the earth, like getting cozy with dying.
Summer is middle school, the tween caste system, and the boy you liked who first told you that Baskin Robbins could be called “31 Flavors” as you walked together, digging your teeth into the chunky balls of fat in Jamoca Almond Fudge, that slutty flavor.
Summer is the tasting of melodies. You can taste them, like fingers in your mouth. Round melodies, sharp ones, corporeal ones. Because aren’t your ears tired, you weak series of folds?
Summer is us feeling like horses, every part of ourselves bigger and more furry, and more majestic but also beastly and embarrassed at how ugly we are when we don’t care about being alive or being dead or puddles of water which is what we are.
Summer is everything happening in the hourglass that was sleepaway camp in New Jersey, pressurized time until your two dumb parents came back, all fanny-packed and glad, their brains braver and juicier than when they dropped you off, having sucked up the pulp of summer.
The absence of a swimming pool affects you like a phantom limb. The absence of a highway feels like someone has cut off your buttocks. This will be a long, long, saturated season, my friend.
Sensory redux. An extra helping of consciousness. We’re at the climax, looking around with raised eyebrows and astonished mouths, silently asking one another when we’ll have to head back down. 
