Tangled in his sheets, my body, tanned from the summer – a last summer of innocence now that I can look back with such distance – is dark against their whiteness. His broad shoulders are freckled by summer too, and the heat is such that our actions leave us both a bit damp. He is the first man who has been naked with me, and it is maybe our third or fourth night together. I am nineteen years young, and not one day of those nineteen years has prepared me to be in this bed, in his arms, in his thrall. How could I be anything but terrified?
It was September – the September I discovered Marianne Faithfull’s ‘A Secret Life’ album – and the track so perfectly titled and timed played in my mind as we laid there in shadow.
The summer dying,
September lives in flame,
The sisters dancing
No happy ending to the game.
Don’t bother to call me – Think I’ll stay here just the same.
I’ve already talked in great detail about what happened between us. Read that here if you’d like. For now, for this one moment, I am going back to that one moment – and it may not even be one moment anymore – maybe it’s an amalgamation of two or three moments, settling and coalescing into one single memory that haunts but no longer hinders my journey. This song takes me back there, to his bed – the bed of the first man I ever kissed – and to this night, just another night in his life of nights, a life that was already double the length of mine. And again I wonder how I could be anything but terrified?
Flaming September, what can you give me that is true?
Do you remember? Do you remember, do you remember… all the life I gave to you?
The summer dying
September lives in flame
My youth lies bruised and broken
No happy ending to the game.
Don’t bother to tell me – I’ll live on here just the same.
That September was hot and stifling one moment, chilled and stormy the next. That’s how it felt in his bed – hot and cold, push and pull – we were each alternately powerful and entirely powerless. Who held sway over whom? The perfect lithe and unspoiled canvass of a nineteen-year-old young man could instantly disarm a thirty-six-year-old’s jaded experience. We weren’t on opposite ends of some human spectrum. We were closer to each other than we realized. I also understood that we could not find our footing outside of his little room. And I knew that it was more than that too.
Flaming September, what can you show me that is new?
My heart remembers. Do you remember, do you remember… all the life I gave to you?
In his watery blue eyes, I looked for answers to my questions. I had so many, and I was so young. How do you know if you’re in love? How and when do you reveal it? I’m not saying I’m in love with you. I only just met you. How can you love someone you barely know? He stopped my questions with a kiss, or a bite, the same way some animals put an end to play, both a tease and a warning. When he had me beneath him, when I could barely breathe, and when I wouldn’t have it any other way, I wondered at whether his warning would deliver some ecstatic death blow to the person I hadn’t quite yet become.
Flaming September, what can you show me that is true?
My heart remembers. Do you remember, do you remember… all the life I gave to you?
Flaming September, flaming September…
