girl summer

the exhaustion of august, directions for a girly summer day & writing prompts

Hi <3

It’s gotten to that part of summer where I want to go back to school shopping and find an incredibly seasonally inappropriate outfit to wear for the first day of school (uggs and a mid-winter warm sweater). The days seem to last forever and there still seems to be not enough time for what I ought to be doing - watching the sunrise and sunset, making a cute little drink, eating ice cream everyday, watching 75 minutes of Love Island a night, reading through my monstrously large reading list, writing everything I’ve ever wanted to write.

In the summer, if you can’t quite rise to the occasion of so much of Everything Delightful, it feels like something is sincerely wrong with you. But the problem with so much of Everything Delightful is that I tend to enter August not clear eyed and oozing an essence of salt air (as THEE taylor swift song suggests) but sort of just over it.

I’m sharing a bit of writing I wrote in July inspired by one of those summer days filled with Everything Delightful. It’s also inspired by what feels like a sudden and vast upswell of girl everything that this summer has brought. Whether it’s the Barbie movie or the tik tok trend of girl dinner, it seems like the theme of this summer is girls everywhere reclaiming girliness. In this vein, I wrote about the perfect girl-summer-day.

girl summer

1. You have to wake up sort of early for your girl summer day when the sun is still slanted. (If you wake up and the sun is full above you and it’s too hot, it’ll lead to a disorientation you can’t shake for several hours)

2. Because it’s girl summer, you’re not alone. You wake up all together in a house that’s sort of dark. A house that mandates you leave to experience the best of the day. 

3. With still sleep filled eyes you start planning, because it’s a rite of girlhood to over plan and the plan goes something like this:

4. Breakfast has sausage or some kind of flour (bagel, a pastry like a danish) that is a probably inappropriate way to start a very hot day. You pair it with an

5. Extra large iced coffee. You usually get medium but on girl summer days you get the largest iced coffee they have. And it’s not just you, it’s everyone in the car because you’re never alone on your girliest of girl summer days. There’s four of you sat in your sections of the car and you all get extra larges with two milk and two sugar.

6. At the convenience store, you assemble your girl snacks for the day. Salt and vinegar chips, hummus, carrots, gummy worms. A soft cooler filled with ice and mint yerba mate, la croix, spindrift, lemonade, arizona iced teas. 

7. You said you would get to the beach at 9:30 but it’s inexplicably 11:30 when you get there. It always is. And that seems to be the truth for everyone. You manifest a parking spot and one appears in someone’s yard for $10 cash and you never have cash but one of you has cash. 

8. You all debate how far you should walk because you’re all weighed down because girls bring too much stuff, like more towels than people and extra water bottles. And one of you always wants to walk the furthest down the beach and one wants to plop down at the entrance so you settle somewhere towards the middle where it’s actually the most crowded. 

9. You have to get hot before you get in. And you might think that you’re already hot from the car with the broken AC and the walking from the lot to the sand but the process of getting hot restarts again when you’ve stripped off your clothes and are just lying bikini on towel. 

10. When you’re hot enough, it’s time for the big underwater time, the longest underwater time, the do-you-want-to-play-mermaids? underwater time. 

11. Drying off on the too many towels all laid out together, we’re gossiping and storytelling and making fun of each other. And talking about the most vulgar memories you can think of as though no one can hear you

12. Until the people in the beach chairs too close to you say, how necessary book banning is and you remember the world you’re actually in because

    1. There’s a bit of this summer girlhood that’s willfully denying what’s there, an easy trade for being momentarily idyllic, bright, Bursting

13. You want to go to goodwill and find the ugliest dresses we can? is the question that brings us off the beach but we get distracted from the goodwill mission by 

14. The big roadside Trust in God sign of an ice cream stand and we all squeal at once, melting soft serve swirls over pink fingernails and it’s nearly perfect 

15. At home it’s time for the best part, bathingsuits for t-shirts and aquaphor on sunburnt lips, water in icey cups and Love Island an octave too loud

16. Something misshapen and barely edible on the grill, you sit on each other in big bucket chairs watching light change (every hue between orange and blue and yellow on the asphalt) and it seems like this is the part of girlhood they probably can’t take from you, laughing all together while the light dims.

something to write & something to read

Something to write: In summer, it often feels like we’re trying to recreate something. Some kind of memory. I want to read a thick book that I feel lost in and I want the dunkin donuts iced coffee to taste exactly how I remember it tasting in 10th grade. Write about a summer memory and ways that you try to recreate it or reach it somehow from where you are now.

Something to read: The City We Became N.K. Jemisin I spent the first part of this summer reading sad girl books (a valiant genre) but I was seeking the feeling of getting lost in a book that I remember from summers past so I went to the science fiction/fantasy section of the bookstore that I usually don’t visit. It gave me EXACTly what I was looking for.

Thank you for reading! If you’d like to get a sex ed question answered in future newsletters, please write it here. 

Love, Zoe

zoe on thursdays is a monthly newsletter from zoe, a writer and sex educator, sharing snapshots of her recent writing and answers to your most burning sex ed questions