About

To. My beloved youth Licking vanilla ice cream, we say to each other: let's never become the kind of adults who drink those common cocktails. What did the crumbling summer mean to us? The vanilla ice cream bought from the neighborhood mart melted into my skin, becoming one with me. The only thing that ever took my breath away was experiencing the sweltering heat. I often looked at the adults in cocktail bars, their faces flushed as they gulped down drinks, and thought that cocktails were just alcohol with grandiose names. Yesterday, I prayed for the sinking summer to stand back up. When I folded my hands, the space between my fingers felt sticky like melted ice cream, and a sweet scent began to rise from my mouth. If bees gathered around that sweet smell, wouldn't that be a kind of luck? I spread my whole body to provide shade for the name tag with loose threads on a school uniform stretched tight from opening my mouth, and I watched with my own two eyes as that loose name became useless for anything. Names are only for the tags dangling from uniforms. Summer, too, ends at being called a season by someone. Right, who could love summer for exactly what it is? The sight of cocktail bars and seashells floating on the sea like sparkling ripples is something you see in summer, but it isn't summer itself. Crumbling summer is our vanilla ice cream getting shorter, the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation we gave to the tropical fish that jumped out of the tank—we realize this kind of useless kindness is futile. While cleaning the summer stuck under our fingernails, we locked eyes with the sunlight that had begun to clump together. I've only just realized that the pronunciations of 'summer' and 'name' are so similar. Why of all things are summer and name so similar? Is giving you a name just another act of useless kindness? Why can't 'kind summer' be a thing? I often think about the adults who call out cocktail names. I wonder why they give such elaborate and lovely names to alcohol that is equally bitter. The names of the cocktails they drank are vanilla melting in the summer; the ice cream still just flows from our hands. There are the named people who grimace every time a cocktail slides down their throats, and there is us, watching them from afar. When we become adults, let's not drink cocktails. Still licking vanilla ice cream, let's leave to find summer. In that summer, I'll give you a new name.