Sundress Season

On life, death, and the sundress

“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The woman puts on a sundress because she wants to be killed while she's still young and beautiful.

The sundress doesn’t just take on the shape of the woman; it takes on the shape of the wind. It is tight on the top and loose on the bottom. It is the color of nature soaking in its best days—cream whites and sky blues, the red of tropical flowers, yellow like new buttercups—the color of life having a dream about itself. It is a dress that seems both freshly modern and primordial.

It is the dress of young maidens and maiden-like monsters that call to men on the edge of the forest. It is a dress that beckons for women to take off their shoes and run through beaches and tall grass, to bare their backs to the sun, to be open to all the possibilities that summer might bring. It is the dress of sex that conceives life.

The woman in the sundress will probably never admit to herself that she wants to be killed. The call of the void exists on the cusp of all beautiful things, the oft-invisible reminder that nothing is supposed to last. We don't want to remember that our youth will run out. (And always sooner than we think. Have you ever seen an old woman look at herself in the mirror with a fresh shock? In her mind, she is still young underneath the frame of gray hair, wrinkles, and sagging skin lumped against weak bones. Time came and stole her away from herself.)

We like to pretend that we’ll never age. Didn't you know that if the machines don't kill us all, they're going to make us live forever? They'll put spacers in our blood and regenerate our cells. We'll have Botox that never dissolves and breastmilk that flows like honey.

But if we can’t live forever, then it’s best to die before you’re old. My friends all said they were going to die at age 27 like Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse. Then, when age 27 came and went and they didn’t go out in dramatic fashion, they said they’d die like Jesus at age 32. Then 32 arrived, and with it came back pain and colonoscopies and divorce and the consequences for bad decisions. We didn’t become the glorious heroes of destruction we imagined we’d be. Death did not arrive, wheels of flames on the tongue of Pontius Pilate, God and cocaine, with promises of an angel’s ascension and the suffering of martyrs.

For most of us, it would come slowly, like each season passing without much reflection, until we turned around one day and saw a stranger staring back at us.

I last wore a sundress when I was 20 years old. It was green and patterned with a halter top. I’d never worn anything like it before or since. It was laundry day and the only thing I had left to wear. I didn’t even have any underwear. My boyfriend dropped me off at the grocery store so I could go to the ATM and grab rent money. I stood waiting for him on the corner in the blaring midday light, no underwear and no purse, the dress whipping around me as I clutched $400 in one hand.

“You look like bait,” he told me.

I felt like bait.

And feeling like bait made me feel alive.

I’d spent most of my teenage years in oversized band t-shirts and baggy jeans. I didn’t want to look sexy. I didn’t like the wandering eyes of men, like predator’s eyes, through the seamy gaps of the atmosphere. If I was perceived, that meant they would want something from me, and I knew there was nothing I had that I wanted to give. I was a virgin, a selective mute, baby-faced, besotted with the idea of my own tragedies. I had no space for romance.

But when I put on the sundress, I was no longer a creature to be passed over. Men asked me for dates. Their eyes lingered over me alongside the street. They honked at me from their cars. One man even drove his car up onto the sidewalk in front of me and asked me to get in beside him.

The sundress reminded us that we had blood underneath our skin. We were not invisible. We had only been pretending to be. We were enmeshed in the center of nature. Wolves always watched us on the edge of the woods. We could fuck in the back of a strange car or commit a murder. If we said the wrong word, maybe we'd be strangled behind a dumpster, wrapped in a trash bag, and dumped somewhere where only the dogs would find us.

Or we could fall in love.

Sometimes, people forget that life is not something that can be controlled. Life is not an algorithm to be manipulated with our meek understanding of the data. We feel unsatisfied with dating apps and the gender discourse and all the tradwives and OnlyFan thots that monetize their lifestyle and try to convince the rest of us that they have the answers. The world is full of know it alls and corporate sellouts and middlemen and bad novelists and people who sold their souls for a chance at a scrap of attention. It would be easy to believe that life was nothing but a long hallway full of bureaucrats with bad backs bent over laptops in yellow lighting.

But then there's the sundress.

When the woman wears a sundress, she knows that love is supposed to be an accident, a convergence that's the closest we ever get to magic.

Her life does not have to be reduced to a series of steps outlined in a book written by someone whose greatest ambition is to get a blurb from Tony Robbins. She can experience her life as a mystery to be discovered. She is the bridge between life and death. She is a transient beauty, but in that moment, beauty is eternal.

Summer will be here forever, baby. When, baby? Soon, baby. You keep that sundress on.

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The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.