Our coquette summer is off to an early start with a little reunion of the kids who attended my office’s ‘Take Your Children To Work Day’ extravaganza this year. Their group got along so well that I proposed a follow-up hang-out with a coquette theme, since the kids seemed to know more about coquette than I did, and the only way to stay young is to keep up on such themes. With that, this song from the Coquette Summer Playlist the 1st, perfect for a moon-filled night:

Moon, a hole of light
Through the big top tent up high
Here before and after me
Shinin’ down on me

Moon, tell me if I could
Send up my heart to you?
So, when I die, which I must do
Could it shine down here with you?

Emi selected this song, as she did most of the songs on the first summer playlist, and it has a lovely, laid-back vibe to it – the perfect backdrop to today’s gathering. If there is rain, that will only add to the underlying shadows of the coquette theme. it is worth remembering that behind the clouds, the moon is still there. 

‘Cause my love is mine, all mine
I love mine, mine, mine
Nothing in the world belongs to me
But my love mine, all mine, all mine
My baby, here on earth
Showed me what my heart was worth
So, when it comes to be my turn
Could you shine it down here for her?

‘Cause my love is mine, all mine
I love mine, mine, mine
Nothing in the world belongs to me
But my love mine, all mine
Nothing in the world is mine for free
But my love mine, all mine, all mine

A nostalgic throwback is best heard deeper into the evening. When dusk falls, so gloriously later in the daily run of the clock, it brings tales back to mind that may or may not have happened. In my childhood, the search for adventure or drama of any kind was a product of too many soap operas and an overactive imagination. Both were enough to sustain me through the summer, the former accompanied by fans, raspberry hard candies and Crystal Light iced tea – the latter inspired by songs that hinted at the love I was on the cusp of wanting. 

Hold me, kiss me,
Whisper sweetly
That you love me
Forever.

I didn’t know then how lucky I was to be wanting for drama, to have to conjure and create mystery and intrigue and difficulty because nothing new seemed to be happening in my life. Such carefree days and nights are the province of youth, and largely wasted upon it. 

And so I indulged in listening to songs that spoke of love and heartache and all the feelings I thought I wanted to experience first-hand. The romanticism and folly of being young… the almost-innocence of being a teenager somewhere between spring and summer…

Hold me, kiss me,
Whisper sweetly
That you love me
Forever.

We are scheduled to hold our first coquette-themed gathering of friends this weekend, and while sun would be ideal, the forecast calls for a cool rain. Maybe that’s more fitting for the coquette theme anyway – the underlying moodiness of it, as personified in a song like ‘Saturn’ by SZA. I have it on good authority that this song is true to the coquette aesthetic, which seems to go just slightly deeper than its beautiful outside trappings. That’s a theme that can become dear to one’s heart.

Life’s better on Saturn
Got to break this pattern
Of floating away
Ooh (ooh, ooh)
Find something worth saving
It’s all for the taking
I always say

I’ll be better on Saturn
None of this matters
Dreaming of Saturn, oh.

There’s a freshness at this time of the year, just as spring prepares to retire and let summer finally take her place. It’s a freshness that masks the mixed emotions that sometimes accompany a switch of seasons, so I don’t often feel the conflicted nature of the crux. Summer sun hides more than it reveals. 

And I haven’t quite yet decided if I’m ready for summer – which won’t slow its arrival in the slightest, merely color how I navigate the early days. I’ll come around eventually, I usually do… In the meantime, when there are rainy days and dismal weather, I’ll turn on the coquette coziness, spray a little ‘Carnal Flower’, and bloom, bloom, bloom… while revisiting the sort of sunny day captured in these pictures. 

The last few weeks of school before summer vacation often played confusing games with my mind. As much as I wanted out, as much as I wanted the drudgery and worry and strain of school to be done, June also made me want to slow things down. Faced with the prospect of freedom, suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. There were spells of enchantment in every school year, and friends who made their mark in my life. All of us had gone through the same trauma and drama in ways that bound us to each other like no one would again. That tender part of one’s life, those formative and impressionable years – I sensed then that they might not ever be repeated, and every June I felt them slip further away. 

I’m a high school lover
And you’re my favorite flavor
Love is all, all my soul
You’re my playground love

Our playgrounds shifted and changed, from the other-worldly, gaudily-painted steel flowers and caterpillars and mushrooms of kindergarten, to the wooden climbing houses and shadowy covered slides, to the almost-adult tracks and courts of high school, just as our play moved from the outside world to the inside of our heads. 

Through those high school corridors, my mind travels back into the past. The hallways feel dimmer in my head than they looked the last time I was in the building. Hazier and more dangerous too, filled with the people who tormented my mind more than they ever troubled me in person, the way most demons wreak their havoc – lazily relying on you to fill in the frightening blanks. And I would always give them more ferocity and power than they ever really held. 

Yet my hands are shaking
I feel my body remains
Time’s no matter, I’m on fire
On the playground, love

Though I could not see it or fully feel it at the time – there was only a vague sense of it – I held my own power too. It was there in the way most teachers appreciated my rapt attention to their every word, there in the compliments garnered from my outfits, there in the gaze of a guy who watched me change in the locker room for gym class, his eyes glued to me no matter how long I waited for him to leave before hastily pulling off my khakis and slipping into sweat pants. Power operated on all planes and playgrounds – we each had some, and we each used it in different ways. We were just starting to see, to learn, to play…

You’re the piece of gold
That flashes on my soul
Extra time, on the ground
You’re my playground love

Anytime, anyway
You’re my playground love…

{Hear more coquette music here.}