'Chasing love one Summer, 1996' by Lindsay Bennett Ford

After laying in the sun the week after graduation freckles burst onto your cheeks like stardust. Carla said you’d never looked so pretty. Paul, the cute boy from the beach, asked you to meet him on Friday. Just those words; pretty-beautiful-honey never seen you before were enough. The steaming hiss of the hair tongs as you tried on Carla’s too small clothes. “Don’t I look good in these?” twirling around sweetening the air with Malibu breath. Downing all the potential of Summer in one gulp.

Loud music vibrating through the wooden floor of the Disco but sober enough to still cringe as Paul dance-thrusted singing the Uh-Oh chorus.  His tongue in your mouth tasted like sweet coconut. Later the kisses went on and on and on, maybe your heart did burst tiny butterfly wings in your chest. So easy to confuse all that sand with love.  

Love was a thing you and Carla chased that Summer; writing down the lines from your favourite books. Stalking around the lockers outside the library, looking for signs in scrawled notes in the margins of well-thumbed poetry books. Singing along to the car radio cruising the wide grey streets in a stub end of a town.     

Pouring Malibu over ice brings it back; each little sip a frozen summer kiss. Decades later on a porch with a retro glass in your hand at sunset watching the neighbourhood girls; seeing that same sticky swell on their skin, brows plucked and eyeliner slicked, jean-shorts rubbing away the last of their puppy fat.  Remembering telling Carla about Paul and the way she beamed with questions. Only now you see that was love - the thing you chased was life right ahead with all its potential stacked on a shelf like unread books.