cherry cola

Hello,

Have you had cherry cola before? It’s a John Hughes movie, it’s an east coast beach town, it’s barbecues and pool parties, it’s Madonna and Springsteen. It’s the sunburn on your shoulders and cicadas in the night—the pure taste of summer.

Some things are portals. My work started providing cherry cokes as part of event catering, and at the first sip, it hit me again.

The summer before my sophomore year of high school, my friends spent nearly every day at the neighborhood pool. Two of them started dating the lifeguards to rather disastrous results—a ruined homecoming and an expensive watch pawned for drugs. A boy liked me for the first time, and I wanted to simultaneously combust. We used to suffer through eight-hour marching band practices in the Texas heat, and between the morning and afternoon sessions, I would go home, lay on the wooden floors, and wash down handfuls of pine nuts with cherry coke. I ate so many pine nuts, in fact, that I turned my taste buds bitter for a week. That’s where the soda came in handy.

It’s a lawn viewing of The Sandlot, an air vent with a bottle of whiskey, a trip to run away and bake in the sun. It’s hot—a seatbelt buckle, a flat truck bed, a parking lot curb. “Sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull / And cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull.” It’s a calling to succumb to the fever dream. The madness creeps in when the sun forgets to set.

This week, DC is experiencing something of a false fall. The temperature dropped to the seventies, but August hasn’t given up the ghost yet and will rebound next week. But it’s been a startling reminder to me that the summer is ending, that I’ve been living in DC for longer than I have anywhere since 2021, that October comes whether you’re ready for it or not.

I don’t feel like I’ve had enough sun in the last few years. I crave the six-month, intense heat that you get in Texas. Is it reasonable to live in? Of course not, but I miss it all the same. Frankly, I carry around a frost in my bones all year, and it can’t be assuaged by a mere three months of summer.

Summers tend to hollow me out a little bit, and I spend autumn trying to fill that. “It's like a dream / No end and no beginning / You're here with me.” How does it all end like this? I think I’m confused by the passing of this summer in particular. I don’t know what I expected, and maybe what I desperately need is the rearview mirror, maybe that’s what being twenty-six is about.

This is simultaneously a summoning circle and an exorcism: cherry cola, fairground lights, an old townhouse, and every shitty poem I’ve ever written about fever dream summers. Maybe being even-keeled through August is a good thing.

The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston
(Recommendation from Shroothi)

What screams summer more than a beach read? Here’s a book that made me laugh and cry, all in one sitting. If only I had a nice, warm, summery beach to sit at.

"Because ghost stories were just love stories about here and then and now and when, about pockets of happiness and moments that resonated in places long after their era. They were stories that taught you that love was never a matter of time but a matter of timing.”

Be prepared for silly puns!

Have you had cherry coke before? Am I being too dramatic about it? What do you associate with summer?

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie