Smudged words ...

(Something I wrote while I was in Rhodes last week)

It’s August and the vacation fever is all around. I can already imagine a woman like me, like us in the islands. Her lover just ordered breakfast, fresh toasted bread with marmalade or honey, fresh orange juice, cappuccino without sugar. It’s hot, the night before they went to sleep very late, in a little bit they will head to the beach again.
Our heroin remembers something, gets up and walks to the nearby kiosk, where she buys cigarettes and magazines; women’s magazines, the likes of In Style, Cosmo and Marie Claire.
The magazines in August have a different life. They will be taken to the beach, where they will be filled with sand. They will be left on the side while we go swimming, picked up again and in the end forgotten. The pages, tired from the abuse now discarded, wet, crumbled by the evening waves that have run through them. Letters and stories a vast smudge, a memory…
Magazines in August are very much like August, lite, cool looking, full of promises for an even better summer. A summer that will find the reader thinner, tanner, taller, sexier and happier. The memories of all the other summers, you carry with you in your bags. They are like diaries that tell us this will be the best summer of our lives. For many of us is, just because we managed to secure the money to go on a holiday, to buy the necessary latest fashions and have decided on the ultimate destination… one of the beautiful beaches on the Greek islands.
Girl holidays are different than those of the boys. Well, I am not sure how the boys go on holidays; I have never really asked them. But a girl goes on holidays with bags filled to the max with accessories and necessities girls can’t live without. God forbid we forget our favorite nail police behind, so we bring a minimum of five. We have a couple fights with our girlfriends before hand, while working the logistics of the trip and if we all make it to the port on time we end up on a dreamy island as planned.
When in the island we share the drunken nights in the clubs. Mornings find us disheveled with make up running down our faces. We share the cheese pies and the coffees, along with the hangovers and we make plans to visit the next beach. We share the lost bathing suits the sandy towels, the kamikaze shots and the endless stories of flirting with strangers. We share the rented rooms, the piles of creased clothes on the heaving suitcases with enough supplies for a couple of months not a couple of weeks. Face creams, hair sprays, gels. We even share sun burns. We rent moppets and ride them around in search of the next beach, bar or club. A day doesn’t go buy when our bathing suits don’t get stuck on the moppet sit and our bodies don’t itch from the sea salt that covers our skin. Sweat, salt, sun and heat all one blanket and comfort is not a word that belong to our vocabulary at this stage. Unstoppable we keep on ridding. We share the limited space on the decks of the ferries that bring us to the islands each summer and to our respective cities in the end of it. We share the blanket of stars in the sky and the music, a sweet lullaby to our summer memories.
Fast forward, time goes by we are now 30- 35 yrs old, things around us haven’t changed. Girls still do the same things, but we are different. We now fly instead of taking the ferry. We have enough money to rent a car instead of a moppet and rather than going on holidays with our best friends or cousins we go on holidays with our partners. We don’t spend countless hours in the sun anymore; we have learned that extensive sun exposure is not good for our skin. We go to classier clubs and bars; we drink cool cocktails instead of B52 shots. We stay at resorts or our respective family beach houses. We don’t argue with our friends we SMS them to compare locations. We read Kafka on the beach and our Cosmo, still present but hidden in the bottom of our beach bag. Even the contains of our suitcase have been upgraded to fancier designer glad numbers, or undetectable to the untrained eye copies. Our accessories well chosen and minimal, perfectly enhancing the Cavali dress we fought over with our best friend on the last big sale. We can’t think of going to the beach without sun block, a large hat and even larger sun glasses.
For some of us going to the beach involves a well orchestrated parade of toys, laughter and cries. Flirting with the cute boys from the north has been replaced with frolicking on the water and building castles in the sand with our kids. We still steal a look behind our enormous sunglasses as their tanned bodies walk by checking out the next young things laying on the beach… with a sigh we go back and reminiscent the times the young things working on their tan were us… but come back to reality as our son or daughter demands more water for their castle building. With a smile we run through our minds all the positives of our current situation, like first class tickets and candlelight dinners with our partners, if we are lucky enough to find a baby sitter or have a nanny… the lycra covering our bodies has a La Perla label sawn on the inside and somebody famous and important is listed on our mobile contact list. Well for some of us anyway…
Something we all have in common is that when we do board the planes to take us back to our individual cities we carry with us another box with summer memories and myriads of pictures.
On the way back we day dream about what happened or what could have happened, mentally tracing the events of the last couple of weeks and already planning our vacation for the next year. Daring to think of more exotic destinations to sip our Bacardi’s. Maybe next year will find us in Goa or the Caribbean. Until then, September is just around the corner, reality will set in soon and our busy schedule will take over our days.
Our August celebrations will be another token for the memory bank.