It might be very southern of me to say, but in the places I’ve lived heat has never just meant heat. It has always been accompanied by the wet, thick in the humid air itself and thicker still as it rises from your own skin or the skin of someone else. This means desire has always been governed by what season raged on around us, what kind of heat we stood in defiance of when chasing the touch of someone else. This connection was never stronger than in the summer. There are not days one looks forward to and knows for a fact will be when the heat will come to make the sweat touch their clothes until they are soaked through. Yet there are always days you turn back over your shoulder and remember breaking the grip of a lover just to wipe the sweat from your hand and return it to its place, and you know that was when it was summer. The seasons, whatever kind they might be, are always hard to predict and easy to remember.

On May 18th , 2020 while everyone on the internet had been talking about the burning world for weeks already Harry Styles released a music video. The song “Watermelon Sugar” was previously released as the second single from his sophomore album “Fine Line” which had been put out the preceding December. All things being equal, it would have surely been a contender for song-of-the-summer. The track carries on its back lyrics of lovers, fruit and breath, a guitar lightly strumming in the background of the intro and its rock influenced cousin that joins in once the chorus drops, a burst of brass that kicks as Styles sings the titular words which evolves into a full suite of instruments by the song’s end. This one would have surely haunted us all through our radios for the warmest months of the year, it still might. The video itself kicks the summer jam aesthetic into full swing, showing idyllic scenes of Styles and a group of beautiful people on the beach touching and holding and feeding each other slices of dripping watermelon. The metaphors for the body are obvious. Clean shots intercut with ones like grainy film that sneak in to create the feeling of nostalgia almost subliminally. The awareness of the present, as the video opens with a title card reading “This video is dedicated to touching” seems impossible to escape.

As a pandemic hit America, then took hold of it, I found myself in the stagnant weeks of quarantine when I might have been gathered with others in some number large enough to call it a mass thinking about the past instead. As America faces a pandemic, after the cold winter turned to spring and in turn crawls its way into summer, I find myself reflecting on all of the summers I’ve had before. For the summer I was spending most of my time in classes or a three-person apartment that both of my roommates would hardly use at the tail end of our one year lease before moving out there is a limbo of nostalgia I find myself falling back in to, romanticizing the very things that made me want to escape it at the time. There is a permission summer grants us when we are young, still in the throes of the education system and its outdated but entrenched approaches to scheduling. This isn’t about that though. This is about the girl, the one who was there that summer for however short a time. It’s about the beer she told me to try, how it tasted like watermelon. How we spent our time together always with a six pack of it in the fridge. How I told her stories of watermelon in the summer from all through my childhood, how this finding its way to me now made sense. This was a season where I knew desire and touch not like far away things but sweet and close. Years later I still mark the beginning of summer by the beer selection at Walmart, or whatever might find its way to the displays at the local liquor store, and I always think of the summer watermelon was on my lips. Memory, much like advertising, has a language.

What I want to make clear is that it is not always the words that make me understand what a musician is saying, but all of the senses themselves. Harry Styles sings about watermelon and a cold one appears in my hand, unopened and sweet. Harry Styles tells me how it tastes and I remember what a song can sound like when it is played with the volume all the way up in an apartment that is empty of most of the people who have lived in it for the past year. I take a container of cut up watermelon out of the refrigerator and after only a few bites wonder how anyone could ever stop eating something so sweet.

During his NPR Tiny Desk concert Styles talks about the process of creating “Watermelon Sugar” and its meaning, “It’s kind of about that initial, I guess euphoria of when you start seeing someone, you start sleeping with someone or just like being around someone and you have that kind of excitement about them”. I’d find out later that much of the work on “Fine Line” was drawn from Styles’s relationship with model Camille Rowe, as well as its ending. In that same Tiny Desk performance Styles also mentions that the Richard Brautigan book “In Watermelon Sugar” was sitting on a table during a studio session for the song and he thought, “That would sound cool”. As it turns out Rowe has mentioned in interviews this same Brautigan book is one of her favorites; this book, a favorite of an old lover, now sharing a name with this track covered in the sweat of desire. Sitting on a high shelf in my bedroom is a blue book, one about happiness and finding your way. I put it there, almost entirely out of arm’s reach, after never reading it. There are many books in this world I have a hard time bringing myself to sit down with, at the top of the list are those given to me by people I no longer have the emotional capacity to speak to. There is an inscription on the inside cover though, in handwriting that reminds me of summer and an empty apartment, I sometimes flip to and glance over whenever the thought of the book, dusty and heavy with memory, crosses my mind.

Despite the pandemic still raging, we are entering a new season of desire and it looks a lot like the old ones. As I write this people are returning to stores, families are renting beach houses and twenty-somethings are stocking up on booze. There are things humans as a species, I’ve noticed, will not be starved of. High on this list is Their Summer, whatever plans they had for it, as well as The Touch we have been told we must not allow ourselves to chase in a time where it may only bring sickness. The same touch that, in the summer, might feel unbearable and so sweet in spite of itself. The feeling of a lover’s grasp is one thing, but the feeling of removing your hand from theirs just to return it, more assured after wiping the sweat from it, is another one entirely. Humans must have something to wish for, and something telling them they shouldn’t.

There are parts of this “new world” that a lot of people have had to adapt to, but I have always known love to come with distance. So, when a friend texts me an invitation for a video call out of the blue it makes sense what to do. I hear the voices and see the faces of friends that one summer, the one before the one I’ve mentioned, worked together in the heat of Georgia. She, the girl that is the girl I mentioned, is there. Her voice is as I remember it, though it never speaks to me directly, and I wonder if she hears any changes in mine, though I never speak to her. Around this same time, I venture to the Publix up the street from my house and find my favorite beer, sweet like watermelon, stocked in the cool aisle. I walk up to my room and take an unread book off the shelf, reading only the handwritten words from an old lover. She wishes me well; she wishes me peace. I have not found it, but I have not given up on it either. I look forward into the summer, check weather predictions, anticipate the new season that lies ahead. I settle for unpredictability, try my best for optimism. I put on Harry Styles, crack open a cold one in the backyard. I remember touching, I celebrate the heat; such sweet, unfathomably close lovers.