The Sea in Me: A Love Letter to My Teenage Summers

There are summers that happen once. And others that happen forever.

Mine lived by the sea.

Every July, like a tide, I would return. A girl with tanned shoulders, a book tucked in her beach bag, and salt crystals clinging to her skin like jewels. I was always half-soaked in sun and dream reading Bonjour Tristesse under the striped umbrella, my eyes wandering away from the page to imagine a world larger than the shore but just as blue.

Those years, somewhere between girlhood and womanhood, belonged to the lullaby of small waves and the orchestra of cicadas. The heat melted everything slowly: time, thought, even the ice cream in the freezer. We had to wait until it softened to scoop it out. Everything required patience. Even growing up.

At night, we’d sit in the garden and watch TV under the stars, the flickering screen casting a silver glow on our legs, sticky with watermelon juice. The sky above us always seemed too wide to belong to just one country. Sometimes, I’d hear laughter from the neighbor’s garden. Sometimes, it was my own voice, telling a friend something I thought I’d remember forever.

Later, when the night wrapped the house in silence, I’d press play on my little Walkman and drift to sleep to the sound of Notorious. Duran Duran felt like a portal to cities I hadn’t seen, boys I hadn’t kissed, stories I hadn’t lived yet.

There was a small wooden boat, too. We’d take turns rowing it out, three girls pretending we were adults with lives so big, they couldn’t possibly fit in our diaries. We made plans in those waters, to travel, to fall in love, to live in Paris or maybe Tangier. None of it unfolded exactly that way. But something stayed.

A scent.

A salt.

A rhythm.

Some part of me never left. She’s still there, skin warm from the sun, holding a paperback by Anaïs Nin or Paul Bowles, watching the horizon and knowing, truly knowing, that the best part of the world is where the land ends and the dreaming begins.