It was the summer of 2011. I had taken a permanent leave of absence from my grueling salon apprenticeship in New Orleans after finding out during a beach vacation that my on again/off again boyfriend of many years was cheating on me. In retrospect, this should not have been nearly as shocking as it was to me at the time. In fact, I seemed to be the only person surprised by this revelation. My mom suggested I spend the summer living with her in Jackson, MS, while I regrouped and figured out where I was going and what I wanted to do with my life. My best friend Ben, who had gone to University in Jackson, was living there then, working at a local wine shop. At the time, Ben lived with his boyfriend, Odiri, two roommates, and a black-and-white cat named Money in a gigantic yellow relic of a house with tall ceilings just down the road from my mom in the historic Fondren neighborhood. The house was aptly named Sunshine City.
My first night in town, I met Ben at Sunshine City. He was grilling with his roommates, Josh and Peter. Josh was a Black Hawk pilot, smiley, handsome, fit, and deeply philosophical. Peter was an eccentric redhead who wore “warlock rings” on each finger, band shirts with the sleeves removed, skintight black denim, and a dangly cross earring. By day, he worked as an engineer in pink polos. I was determined to have a summer romance. So instantly, Josh and I fell into a flirtation. By the end of night one, we were laid up cuddling in his bed and had concocted a rather elaborate plan: we would date for the summer, but we weren’t allowed to fall in love. I voided said contract about a week later when I got the ick after going to a movie and hearing him laugh. He was rather upset and told me he, in fact, did love me. We had kissed a time or two; this wasn’t part of the contract. It was time for me to move on.
Earlier on my first day in Jackson, I had placed a phone call to one of my sister’s psychics. Par for the course when dealing with heartbreak. It was all very cryptic, but she gave me a list of names. David was to be the name of my summer fling. “You are more than just friends,” she emphasized. In week two, like magic, David entered the mix. David was a friend of Ben’s boyfriend, Odiri. They had gone to high school together. David was smart, tall, and handsome with boyish good looks. His mannerisms and vocal affectations were almost as if he had time-traveled from the turn of the last century. He had gone to the New School in New York, was a bit of an Aquarian oddball, and had exceptional taste in music. His favorite pastime was soaking in the tub while reading great American novels. David was only in Jackson for the summer, a brief stop before he moved to Germany to be with a girl he had met traveling. They weren’t dating yet and communicated exclusively through long handwritten letters. He didn’t have a phone, but gave me his dad’s number. Instantly I knew this was to be my summer romance.
Since David also lived in Fondren, at his parents’ house just between my mom’s house and Sunshine City, he asked me for a ride home that night. The ride turned into hours of conversation about heartbreak while he spooned me until we fell asleep with Johnny Flynn’s Brown Trout Blues looping on repeat in his bedroom. I’m going to be ok, I thought to myself when I woke up the next morning. Since David’s summer trajectory was as ambivalent as my own, we instantly fell into lockstep. We spent our mornings perusing the Lemuria bookstore. In the afternoon, we walked to McDade’s grocery and picked up a 6-pack of strawberry Abita to drink on his parents’ porch while we streamed music through a new to America invite-only app the German girl had introduced him to, called Spotify. In the evenings, everyone would gather at Sunshine City.
There we drank mint cocktails out of old votive holders and played Boggle nightly. Bon Iver, Arcade Fire, Purity Ring, and Twin Shadow provided the soundtrack to our shenanigans. David or I would take turns fiddling around on guitar. We all took turns cooking. We drank countless bottles of Line 39 wine. We took incredibly dumb photos, mostly of me in the same orange crop top, that we shared to no one in particular on a new photo app called Instagram. A cast of characters rotated in and out of the house daily, but we were the mainstays. I even had a key and my own rollaway cot. Ben joked that I was the Heather Locklear sent to shake up the stale cast of Jackson’s Melrose Place. Once everyone else went to sleep, probably because they had jobs to attend the next day, David and I would walk around the neighborhood and experience Mississippi magic nightly. We’d have heady dialogues or make out in random lawns. One balmy night, we fooled around under the giant Magnolia at the Cedars’ wedding venue next to my mom’s house. I came home that night with no less than 200 ant bites. Another evening we stayed up in his bedroom, til the sun rose, writing a song called Sunshine City. At some point that summer, I had settled on moving to Austin in the fall, and David was still going to Germany after a trip to Egypt. We exchanged “I love yous” on some starry-lit Fondren lawn anyway, both of us knowing full well that we were only dating with a deadline. It didn’t make it less true.
At some point that summer, David gifted me an invite to Spotify, and we began exchanging cryptic yet meaningful playlists. It tickles me to no end that I still keep this practice to this day. My Spotify reads like a personal live journal of memories, each carefully considered track and title of my playlists honoring a moment I’ve loved.
That Summer culminated with David’s dad’s 70th birthday party hosted at the Cedars. A high school buddy of David’s played piano while I crooned Don McLean’s American Pie for all of his parent’s friends. The next night, Sunshine City hosted the biggest party of the summer. Every rotating character from our nightly antics showed up. Brittney Rosella read tarot from a tiny table. We watched fireworks and lightning bugs from the lawn, where a bonfire burned. I dressed like Sandra Dee in a yellow fit-and-flare dress. We laughed; we danced. And then the summer was over.
As the summer ended, we all said our goodbyes. That summer at Sunshine City was one of the only moments in my life I can remember feeling truly nostalgic for a time before it was even over, and I know each of us strangely shared that sentiment. David and I wrote occasional long letters back and forth through the fall and winter. No surprise, it had not worked out with the girl in Germany. We then met up for drinks in Jackson on the night before Christmas Eve that year. After a few too many mint cocktails at our favorite Babalu bar, we headed to Sunshine City for another party, but it simply wasn’t the same. The magic had left. We abandoned the party and got a hotel room instead, where we shared a bath and talked all night for one last time.
The Sunshine City house no longer exists; it was eventually condemned and demolished. The thought of that giant yellow house, which held so many people and memories, disappearing into dust is the most literal depiction of Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” I can think of. Aside from Ben, who is essentially my soulmate, not that many of us really kept in touch in a meaningful way. It’s such a potent reminder of how many pockets of magic and mystery each of our lives hold. Some moments aren’t meant to last. We can never return to them, and likely that’s what makes them so magical in the first place.