27.02.2024

There's a page on Facebook that showed up in my suggestions, that's all about Miami Beach from the 50s - the 80s, and, scrolling through all the pictures, I'm filled with a visceral, and often painful kind of nostalgia. There's a certain blue-ish yellow cast to the light in these pictures, and I can feel the strong, acidic sun on my sunburnt arms and back; I can smell the Solarcaine, and the way the old hotel rooms smelled: slightly musty, and extra air conditioned,  and with 40 plus years of old cigarette smoke and suntan oil and perfume still clinging to their blackout curtains. 

I remember the summer we were on Hollywood beach, and that scratchy,  white, gauze shirt I wore daily. It was the summer that "Personal Best" came out, and I was 12, or 13, or 10, and I remember running on that beach, wanting to be Mariel Hemingway, feeling both excited, because her character was like me, and wanting to celebrate this visibility by embodying it, yet hoping that nobody would be able to tell that that was what I was doing, afraid of the possibility of exposure of such an intimate truth. 

I remember how- in the evenings, at Rascal House, my shirt still stuck to my body from the combination of heat and sweat and suntan lotion and Solarcaine, as I pulled the pumpernickel and onion rolls from their basket, scooping out their insides with a probing index finger and stuffing them full of the delicious "health salad" from the stainless steel bowls. I remember feeling exotic, with my wild curls untamed, my tan, and the carved, coconut wood, monkey head pendant I wore on that trip tight around my throat, a souvenir from one of the open front shops along the boardwalk.  

So much triggered by images of a gone time. 

The pain is in the reminder of the many things lost that I'd taken for granted.  The quiet presence of my father, before life had made him bitter; my mother's fat, soft hand on my side as I- sleepy from a day in the sun, lay my curly head in her lap.  The innocence and hope and naive belief that nothing would ever really change that much, because the now, back then was so interminably long.  

It all feels so close still, as if  by turning my body in some, certain way, I might still reach out, and touch it, but it's gone.  Even the places in which these memories are set have disappeared, and the people, and the culture that they'd embodied, gone. Gone. 

Gone,  and I think–

I shouldn't stare at these pictures anymore for now.  The past has a way of seducing us with its idealised perfection, and I know myself far too well;  I'm in grave danger of drowning in that blue-yellow light.