August

This is the beginning. The highly efficient divestiture and distribution of food, board games, alcohol, and personal belongs. Lining up the Malibu rum, pineapple juice, port, Berringer white zin, cheap amaretto, desert wines that taste like grapefruit, Jaggermeister, and a veritable army of beer bottles. Dead soldiers will replace those sent off to perform their duty, and a glass graveyard will stand in place within just one week. The first cigarettes are smoked on the deck.

This is love. Watching NE dance with her husband to Spiderbait’s Black Betty; she stands on the coffee table as the music makes her free and she sheds clothes until she has been reduced to the essentials, the beat riding her hard and bringing her closer to her husband who stands in front of her like an open and closed doorway, dressed only in swimming trunks that can be zipped into a pocket and a cowboy hat that looks oddly appropriate.

This is serenity. Skinny dipping on a hot August night with five of your best friends. Fish nibble at your calves as you drift along on your back; the chorus of crickets and the pinpoints of stars overhead provide context for the moment (time is thin here, and the warm embrace of the water is dangerously comforting).

This is lust. Hands on SB’s waist as she presses along NE’s back. Feeling NE through SB, through the rhythmic pressure of thighs along thighs and something deeper, something more…more because it is the wanting of it, the wanting more of it, that makes it feel so very fucking good.

These are the moments in between. The card playing, the book hiding, the wine splashing, the trampoline wrestling, the fish saving, the long discussions about crippled brothers, traffic, balls (size), C sharp, threesomes, and being controlled from behind; the languid days that are so correctly similar that they blur like an out of focus movie reel until they make one long continuous ribbon of memories.

This is vacation.