Different things that smell the same: Cut grass, cut watermelon. They’re both green. Do they smell the same because they are the nostalgic cuts of summer break? “Cuts”, as if each summer was a set that someone created for their feature length film, something similar to Adaptation. Youth summers were a set-up, because we did it like we knew how — only as kids we truly knew how to do nothing and still make it count as learning — a set up by adults who crave to relearn how to ground their feet into the lawn, and forget their head for a minute.
Public parks across the city are like sticky-tongued flypaper. Summer is intoxicating, the fountain season of getting closest to ourselves. Even our hair gets back to its roots and we don’t let it get to our head: humidity breeds poofy hair. Sit in the city parks like sweet smelling beds of childhood, big enough for us all. The public roots down their toes, twisted in the grass; falling like flies to the dark cool green ground, sitting one by one, as if bumped from the heel to fall back onto the earth. This is easily done when our outfits are loose, thoughtless, and instinctual: the best combination I’ve seen all July is a forest-green swim trunk topped with a neon-yellow tee.