Blue Dress Hot Mess

July did not begin with a kiss, as it has done before. 

The earth smells like sun-dried grass and straw. It is like the burning of a cigarette; bushfires of corner-shop tobacco flaming from within a crackling Rizla roll. It is light and tangy and smells almost like aftershave. If I could eat it, I would taste a lemon. If I could smoke it, I would be sitting at a round cafe table along the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Nothing could be more simple. I would drink an espresso. The coffee would be heavy, weighted, like the thick medicine of a cigar which wraps itself around your mouth, your tongue, your throat. This cigarette is a trickle; a stream of sweetness through the morning mist, a haze of evening in the morning traffic which isolates and excludes just as it fills and expands. I breathe. The sun fades slowly, clinging on to the landscape. I hope she is not scared to let go. 

I do not smoke. 

I scream Stick Season in a traffic jam on the A14, watching as 11 men work on a Saturday to dig a ditch along the side of the road. One man sits in the digger with his feet on the steering wheel. The traffic is at a standstill. The man in the digger shuffles, moves one leg to the floor, and twists to peer across the central barrier at me through my open window. I move my fingers to the beat on the car’s tinny roof and keep singing. Oblivious. It’s a good song, after all. 

One of my best friends calls me to tell me she’s hooked up with my ex boyfriend. He is the only boy I have ever loved and it has been a year and a half since he broke my heart. She is crying. I don’t know what to think but I tell her it will be ok. I don’t really want to think about it. Can’t not think about it. Certainly, don’t want to picture it. I tell her that if they get married and have babies I still want to be a godmother. I don’t know if I’m taking it well or just not taking it at all. She’s still crying. We tell each other we love each other. I trust and believe that we do. We hang up the phone and say we’ll see each other for lunch on Saturday, and I go downstairs and pretend I’m not thinking about it and make my own lunch and feel nauseous and am shaking but I still think it’s ok. I feel ok. (Maybe O.K., ok). I look at the dog. I look at the garden. I look at my home, which looks like Heaven today. All green — so green, so that it looks like July in a window-frame. I look down at a magazine and pretend to read. Can’t. Still think it’s ok. I move the coleslaw around my plate and feel sick. 

Going to find some chocolate.