Everything in July
I wrote the personal essay included in this post about the magical, serendipitous moment when I met my husband and we fell in love. It was rejected by a literary contest last week.
“While we found your essay moving and really enjoyed reading it, unfortunately, it didn’t make the final cut. We applaud your courage in sharing your personal story, and we wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere.”
I’m placing it on my own Substack with all of the gusto I can muster.
The number of declinations I’ve received from various literary magazines, contests, and agents within the past few months has been amusing as each reader and judge has, I’m sure, worked in cahoots with another to systematically kill literally all of my darlings.
I wrote Everything in July for a short-form creative nonfiction contest. It was rejected. I have written an unpublished poetry collection of the same name. I am nervous to query it. They’re both about my husband who is the most thoughtful, attentive father and the only man I’ve ever wanted to write love stories about.
Love always trickles its way into my writing, especially now that I’m a mother, and I’m a sucker for reading romance in its seemingly infinite iterations and blended genres. But it’s not the tropification of love that lingers on my psyche; it’s how it drives the human condition.
It turns you upside down and inside out. It rips. It shreds. It heals. It scars. It decorates. It is violet doilies and paper hearts. It is also red lipstick all over a letter. Gums cut on shards of glass. Feathery and light and homebound.
Love is a chameleon — it shows up as desire, lust, romance. As a friend, a daughter, a mother, a sister, a wife.
Today, it’s showing up as prose in your hands because I’m pining over the day I met my husband seven years ago.
Everything in July
By Violet Carol
There’s the first love, the kind that grows a butterfly garden in your abdomen. It gives you a stomachache that brings you to your knees, and you remember you’d rather have your head in the clouds than be tethered to the same muddy ground you’ve always sunk into that leaves you dirty and despondent. You climb out of the soil and you walk away, barefoot, curly brown ringlets flailing wild.
If you’re lucky, in time, you then find the psychedelic love, the kind that momentarily traps you in a hazy plume of glitter, but you can’t tell the difference between reality and the romanticized air that might be smothering you. You inhale until irreverent smoke fills your lungs, and when you exhale, you come down and you crawl to the exit beneath the fumes, eyes closed, tear streams iridescent, praying the door is real.
If you’re lucky, in time, you carry on. You find weightlessness in freedom, and you find love in everything that can be touched. You beckon strangers at strange hours and try on lives like you’re an eager starlet begging for roles in genres you’ve never heard of, and you spin with the globe until you land on a lake in North Carolina where an unseen tide rises and pulls you under and pushes you back out, knees cleansed, lungs purged.
You collide underwater with the love that’s sublime. It ripples and it hypnotizes. It’s the kind of love that makes all the other loves irrelevant. The kind of love that has woven itself through time, rooting in the present in icy blue water beneath azure skies on the Fourth of July.
When love calls, you answer. You don’t wait for it to collapse or to expand. It does nothing on its own. It requires combustion and capture. It requires you to time travel, to imagine yourself five years from now asking your present self if you blinked and missed everything — if you stayed 3,000 miles away from your greatest adventure because you were too afraid of risk, and you wonder if it is worse to become disenchanted or regretful in time.
You recognize the imminent nostalgia, Transatlanticism lulling melancholic warnings against complacency, and you act. You lock eyes with a blonde man beneath the holiday sun and you read his seafoam irises like poetry printed in a language only you can understand. You murmur lullabies to each other in the middle of the afternoon. You interlock fingers and hands and then fingers and hands in hair. You pretend you’re a better swimmer than you are and make a fool of yourself drowning in deep water for someone who was always going to carry you. Your friends’ mouths are agape at the sight of the flashbang; they flee the water to avoid the electricity and leave you there to ignite. You choke on water and laughter and possibility. You spend just 24 hours together before you decide this is the end.
You wear a red-and-white checkered romper, and you dance to Death Cab for Cutie, and you melt into each other on a cheap Ikea couch, red wine decorating the beige cushions. You chase giant moths in your grandpa’s cabin at four in the morning. You climb on countertops and raid the snack drawer like ravenous children who have stolen the cookie jar. You paint the night sky with dreams of each other in shades of indigo. You watch the sun rise above his tattooed back in your favorite yellow room against the backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains. You trace wrinkles and scars and freckles like you’re finding new constellations. You say don’t go, and he doesn’t.
You decline your fancy lawyer job offer you never really wanted, and you abandon The Before and you move across the country in your Toyota Corolla with all your belongings stuffed in the backseat, grunge soundtrack blaring through barren lands, for a man you barely know, but you know he is everything.
You know he is honest and true, mesmerized by the same Lake Norman currents that screamed unabashedly in the summer heat like Sirens, teasing, “Will you sing? Will you dance? Will you become the music?” We do. We interlace. We crescendo. We succumb to the reverie, and we build a life.
Me, a wife. Me, a mother.
He plants me in a butterfly garden. He brings me to my knees then carries me to the clouds and we float through the atmosphere. We live like fairies wisping beneath a polka-dotted mushroom dousing everything in magic and whimsy. We wait each year in greedy anticipation for the seventh month to worship the water for everything blue and pure and dazzling. The sky explodes but we swim in it, deep navy and twinkling, blinking, drinking rivulets of memories —
for everything in July.
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Intimate and confessional writings on motherhood, womanhood, and identity.
This is stunning.
You're a beautiful writer. I think it's kinda rad you're getting rejections, btw -- it means you're putting your work out there and TRYING. You inspire me. xx