Lately there’s that summer smell, and I’ve got that summer feeling of wanting to be somewhere else, wanting things that are just out of reach.

I could live on tea and cheese and chocolate, I think.

I’ve been thinking about Girls again lately, specifically Hannah’s relationship with Adam. Like a lot of people, I think (though obviously, despite my use of the collective “we,” the ideas in this tumblrpost do not claim to represent any opinions but my own), when Girls began I was like, “Oh my god, I’ve dated that guy, this is so crazy, Lena Dunham knows my life,” etc. In the beginning I think we liked Hannah’s relationship with Adam because it reflected our own relationships we’d had with certain boys, and then we liked it because it rewrote these relationships we’d had with boys we wanted more from that we could never get, rewrote it with a happy ending and everything we thought we’d always wanted from these absent, seemingly feeling-less boys (were they feeling-less, or could we just not see the complexity of their—albeit of a different sort from ours—feelings  through the intensity of our own?), a kind of therapy through fiction, the kind that tells you you’re always repeating the same broken cycle until it somehow manages to fix itself. But then I think we grew tired of Adam and Hannah because it stopped feeling real, was either too good or too bad and not enough in between, and in the end I think we don’t want to be saved by those boys we’ve wanted, even if it ends up proving that they liked (loved?) us all along. And it’s not that I think we have to save ourselves from them, like they are inherently bad (though in the case of Adam, there is that whole awful dubious consent thing to consider), but I don’t think we want them swooping in to save us from ourselves either. That’s not what it’s supposed to be about, and I think we all know that that’s something you can only really do yourself.

I still don’t know the name of those trees with the sweet, musty, yellow-smelling flowers that grew outside my elementary school, but they have them in Chicago too, all around my old neighborhood and along State St. on the way to Water Tower Place, where the same women still stand behind the perfume counters at Macy’s.

From Chicago I went southwest, to the boy whom in my life I have liked if not the most then certainly the most complicatedly, and his breath on my forehead smelled like him and history repeating and the way that even though I’m not very good at letting go of things, at least I can do it sometimes, but I just can’t seem to open my hands and stop holding on to people, and let’s not even talk about places.

Yet somehow, coming back again after a long while away, the way I hold them seems to change.

You guys, I’ve had a brilliant idea.

Peter Pan, but with cats.

Just imagine it:

All kittens, except one, grow up.

No, but seriously, did Justin Beiber model his entire look and persona on Amanda Bynes in She’s the Man?