Perfect Skin
The Sweet Summer Song Challenge
This is my response to the Sweet Summer Challenge From Oneg and James.
Challenge #1 Sweet Summer Song: Pick a song that represents summer for you. Use the song as the title of your piece, and to inspire either a poem or a short story/micro fiction about summer. Feel free to use some of the song's lyrics in your piece as well. So what does summer feel like for you? Click here
Back as a teenager in the 1980s, I had bought the Rattlesnakes album by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions a couple of years after its release and played it on repeat. Still to this day, when I hear Are You Ready to be Heartbroken, I have a Pavlovian impulse to get up and turn the record over to listen all over again.
The album was true to my teenage aspirations to be sophisticated and aloof (and a little bit obscure). My other aspiration at the time was to be Lloyd Cole’s one-time lover and muse for future wistful love songs. It is interesting I didn’t see him as a steady and reliable long-term partner. I suspect I realised that the deftly written witty lyrics probably came at the expense of easy company.
But my favourite song lyric of all time remains:
She's got cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin
And she's sexually enlightened by cosmopolitan…
The longest summer is the one just before university
For me it was a summer of wistful lyrics and witty asides
Pinning down my personality and trying on sophistication for size.
I chose my soundtrack, oh so well.
There was no cohesive narrative.
Just some words that sounded cool.
My teenage crush I chose him, oh so well.
He wanted cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin
I was a Holly Go-Lightly vibe
And eyes too large
He didn’t smile my way
(Or any way – he knew a pout looked better on camera)
And my eyes went out in vain.
Lloyd was a boy, I knew him oh so well.
He had hair like Elvis and eyes like a puppy
He was lyrically enlightened by Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues
In case you come to a conclusion
Other than that which is absolutely necessary
We would take a car-ride from the grimy pavements of the city
And we would lay a blanket on the great outdoors
And I would be sexually enlightened by a problem page in Just 17.
And I’m not the only one to indulge in a one-off date. Also check out this story about a date with Harry Styles.
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About the Creator
Rachel Robbins
Writer-Performer based in the North of England. A joyous, flawed mess.
Please read my stories and enjoy. And if you can, please leave a tip. Money raised will be used towards funding a one-woman story-telling, comedy show.
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Comments (7)
So well done, I have to listen to this song again!
Very well done.
Looooove the theme here. So enthralled be the creativity of a loving venture. You shown how powerful a song can be, and the veritable of emotion it can incur, this one sizzled.
Fantastic work!
As I read this I am listening to a playlist of songs from my teenage years (playlists will never match up to mixtapes, but I am making do!) and Lenny Kravitz's 'Stand By My Woman' is playing. It is one of those songs that send chills down my spine and freeze me to the spot the second I hear the opening chords, and I am 15 again, and the world is full of possibilities. I think we all need more reminders like this; to remember who we were and who we wanted to be, in a time when it felt anything was possible. I can't go back there, but I can write myself a new beginning, and taste those different lives.
So well done and a very personnel take on the prompt.
Oh I love this so much, and how you structured it from prose to poem to prose so smoothly And this line 🔥 “Pinning down my personality and trying on sophistication for size.” So true!