long distance love letters - by karen cheung - shallow eyes
1. It is July, just days shy of your birthday, and we have brought you a watermelon cake. (What is this hipster bullshit, I think at first, but within one bite I am a convert.) You meet us at the ferry pier and we trek out to the beach in our swimsuits under our sweat-soaked shirts, the elastic of our masks hanging loose around our wrists as though they are schoolgirl hair ties. A scent synonymous with summer: coconut sunscreen, mosquito repellent. For years I longed to move to your island, make a writing nook out of a quiet, solitary house overlooking the sea, but in those days my life had not belonged to me alone, and the dream remained a dream. You are a child of the crab—cancer sun and, like me, cancer moon, and when I learned this it all made sense, our long conversations about our mutual obsession with home. This is our superpower: wherever we go, we shall carry home on our backs with us, within our impenetrable shells. In the biting wintry days of London, held together by just a dusty pink goose feather down and incapacitated by a cold for the second time in three weeks, it is these glorious, filthy days of summer I miss most. ‘If we opened me up, we’d find beaches,’ Varda says. This is what has been hardest about living in a landlocked city—when you’ve spent all your life in the company of untamed waves, the Thames is barely water. Carve us open and they, too, will find the ocean.
1. It is July, just days shy of your birthday, and we have brought you a watermelon cake. (What is this hipster bullshit, I think at first, but within one bite I am a convert.) You meet us at the ferry pier and we trek out to the beach in our swimsuits under our sweat-soaked shirts, the elastic of our masks hanging loose around our wrists as though they are schoolgirl hair ties. A scent synonymous with summer: coconut sunscreen, mosquito repellent. For years I longed to move to your island, make a writing nook out of a quiet, solitary house overlooking the sea, but in those days my life had no
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