Two summers back, I dated this woman who asked me never to write about her¹. I really liked her, and we had this wonderful, idyllic summer romance.

Summer romances require certain preconditions, and we had them all. We were both recovering from awful relationships; her with some guy with a ponytail who'd reduced her self-esteem to that of a garden slug over about six years and me with a very nice, attractive woman whom I treated like dogshit for liking me. We had separate lives in different geographical areas; she lived 150 miles away in Philly, so I would road trip up to visit her weekends, or she would greyhound down here (many a romantic scene in the shithole bus terminal on 1st Street). We had wanted each other quietly but desperately for months, having scandalized all manner of gossipy prigs by talking forehead to forehead for hours at a few parties, flirting in a manner slightly less obvious than strip kickboxing. And, most important of all, we had both sworn not to have some awful, tawdry summer romance to salve our wounds. I had just sworn before witnesses that I would devote the summer to weightlifting, sobriety, my novel, and possibly the political death of Randall Terry² when the phone rang. It took me ten seconds to place her sweetly reedy voice, modulated by a smirk; it took me perhaps three minutes set up a meet.

It all becomes a blur from there. That's a hideous lie, but no one really wants to hear about the monstrous crush of details I remember from the sticky, steaming mess of a D.C. summer of unleashed desire. The cold snap of a Tijuana switchblade, the fibrous pop of my jaw trying to dislocate, the plasticine honey smell of Astroglide in air-conditioning: these will do.

And in the end, there was the final precondition of a summer romance: The Expiration Date. She was kiting off the Oxford to study Philosophy (how gorgeous) in September, we had known from the start. But it is at the end, when the bill comes due, that the best of us go chickenshit. September came, with its fake sunlight and perfume of rot, and neither of us could say goodbye. So romantic, so idealistic, so arrogant, blitheringly stupid and fuck-drunk were we. We decided to stay together, though so far apart.

It all becomes a blur from there. Not really. Nothing so agonizingly slow could possibly blur. Every memory is perfectly formed - a bathtub full of hair dye, mucousy takeaway Chinese and glassy cider, an ocean of dead air on the phone at night. Couldn't miss a thing, couldn't change a single detail. Like reading it in a book.

The end, which came as predictably as the overwrought curtain call at the end of an abysmally dull play, can be reasonably blamed on obvious factors (long-distance romances require inordinate levels of commitment, love sometimes just fades, she wanted to fuck around and still have me on retainer when she got back, the moon was in pisces, etc.). But I think it comes down to a fundamental conflict between reality and desire³. The desire was, of course, for the fun not to end, and the reality was that a summer romance is a summer romance.