Sunshower by Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band
Words & photographs by Anonymous
When I took these photos, we’d just thrown the blankets in the back seat still full of sand, along with all of our things mixed in together from our morning at the beach. The almost ocean, that’s what I’d called it.
I’d wanted so badly to see the ocean that summer. But by late August and after all of our car trouble, all we’d been seeing was a lot of work and one another. So, one afternoon, I asked him if he’d want to drive with me to the “almost ocean” aka. Lake Michigan, just for the night. Even though we’d been dating for three months by then, I was nervous. But he said yes.
So, a few days later, we threw some shit in my car and left St. Paul for Milwaukee, where we slept on a bare mattress in the basement of a friend of a friend’s, who left us a thermos of coffee in the morning which I sat drinking in the living room, where a small square of sun had settled into the floorboards. The birds were loud outside. I’d woken an hour before him and when he finally walked upstairs with a towel thrown over his head and began to sing in the shower, I was sitting there writing in the small notebook I keep with me about how sometimes I am sure that I am falling in love with you and sometimes, more lately, I feel like we don’t know one another at all.
Three months earlier, it was spring break 2019. Two swimsuits, a pair of shorts and a sweater made it into my backpack along with one tube of sunscreen and a cheap disposable camera. Viv and I flew to meet four of our friends in Savannah, Georgia, where Phoebe’s family lived. We piled under the covers in her childhood bedroom, talking about Savannah’s ghost stories and digging through old boxes of drawings from when Phoebe was little. I remember Spanish moss hanging from the trees and azaleas in bloom. The winter before had been harsh, and I felt like my body was softening into Georgia’s heat.
We all drove in Phoebe’s car to a villa we’d rented near the beach, where we all shared beds and soon the sheets were filled with sand and the garbage can with a pile of cheap wine bottles. Always awake the earliest, I would make the coffee in the morning. And then, still fuzzy from the day before, we would wrap orange juice and salsa in cloth bags with cocoanut rum and whatever ungodly sweet alcohol the girl with the best fake ID had bought the day before, and we would walk the ten minute path to the beach. It was early spring so it was never crowded. Laying spread out next to dune grass, we watched the tide recede out, leaving behind slimy violet-blue jellyfish. Drunk on juice salted with sand, we would run into the freezing waves. We chased seagulls away from the beached jellyfish and I have photos of us holding the dead ones with our hands. I remember feeling drunk-stuck to to the blanket I was laying on and thinking about how their half eaten bodies looked like Jell-O someone had gone at with a knife.
We passed days in this slow haze of sun and sleeping; spending a couple hours cooking dinner, watching horror movies and scaring each other in the dark. I remember waking up one morning, I’d fallen asleep in the big bed beside Phoebe, to the sound of Lydia down the hall singing some sort of high-pitch silly little tune that sounded like it was in a made-up language, or baby talk, and then pretty soon Phoebe was calling back and they went on singing like this until breaking into the chorus sun shower just a sign of the power, of loving you! Oh baby, until everyone in the house groaned awake. And then the next morning, and every morning after, went the same way, until they were yelling from room to room SUNSHOWER GOT ME BY THE HOUR, WANTING YOU! OH BABY! While we were walking to the beach, they were singing Sunshower. I woke up and accidentally washed my teeth with sunscreen, and they were singing Sunshower. We all ended up with sunburns. They were blasting the song on the drive back to Savannah after the week was over, and I don’t think I fully got the song out of my head until the sun appeared in Minnesota’s late spring, a month later.
We had been about to climb in the car when I started laughing. I was looking at the side of the house, where this absolutely monstrous sunflower was blooming like a living showerhead, and instantly I was thrown back into that week of my friends singing that stupid song that’d gotten so stuck in my head. I started singing Sunshower to him, trying to explain. I asked him to go stand under it and reached for my camera in the center console. I know that when I tried to explain that memory to him it didn’t make any sense because I didn’t know the artists’ name, so I couldn’t play it on the stereo on our way home—it seemed so silly at the time. But I pulled out that camera anyway, the same one I’d brought to Savannah with five or six frames left on the role. Those last shots were of the fake-ocean Lake Michigan, of him in front of it, and of him under the Sunshower sun flower and none of me because when he asked, I said no.
I wouldn’t see those photos until early October. By then, we’d ended things. Sitting on the curb outside his house, I remember looking at him and seeing another person refusing to look me in the eyes. I understand now why things went the way they did. But there was a day in a Walgreens parking lot where I was sitting in the drivers seat alone with a photo envelope in my hand, looking through those sun-bleached shots of Georgia and forgetting about the ones of him until the end. And it’s so strange, because as everyone knows, disposables give you notoriously shitty images and you only get a few good photos off a camera. So it was a shock when the ones of him were clear as the day I’d taken them. At the time, seeing them felt like some sort of hot knife in my stomach. I’d forgotten that exact blue of Lake Michigan in late summer, the brown of his skin against it and that bird inked into his arm.
Eventually, Viv made me take those photos off my wall. She was probably right about that. I’d even thought the same, at first, thrown them in the drawer like you’re supposed to, tried to forget about it. But the thing I couldn’t get over was how I’d lost a relationship, sure, the person. That’s hard enough. But it’s losing the ability to enjoy those memories, losing the only person who shared them with you and now they exist solely in your head where they hurt, or you get rid of them. But I didn’t want to get rid of them—I wanted to be able to look at them and not feel the ending part. I wanted to be able to look at them and remember my off-key singing, him sleeping on the ride home and the way he woke up while the sun was setting and smiled at me, and wouldn’t tell me why. But eventually, I listened to Viv, because no matter how much I wanted to feel that way, I missed it.
It’s spring, 2020. I was in Buenos Aires, Argentina in orientation for film school when COVID-19 sent my exchange program back home. After quarantining myself for two weeks, I’ve found myself back in my parents’ house, trying to figure out what I’m going to do. Before I left, I’d sent a laundry basket home with my mother, full of everything I’d parted with last and those few items that hadn’t been packed into storage; a few sweaters, the books that hadn’t made the cut, and a box of miscellaneous paper and photos, old notes, poem drafts. When I walked into my childhood bedroom, I found that box on the floor and I’ve been looking through it. I found these photos, and it’s been almost a year now since we met. And we haven’t spoken since that day outside his house. In the past year of my life, I’ve encountered plenty more to miss, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how nostalgia, now, feels like missing an entirely different world. One where we can get in the car and drive to a new city carefree, where my friends and I are drunk and sharing one wine glass and hugging one another; when summer was something to be captured on a disposable camera and found again awhile later, believing all the while that the season would turn and it would be warm enough to do it all over again the next year.
I guess what really fucks me up about all of this is that I don’t miss you anymore, but I do miss the people we were—and the world we lived in that we thought would go on forever. Sometimes, I wish I would have told you that I loved you, because I think I did. I guess more than anything I just wish I could still share these memories with you. With someone. So I’m writing it down, and I hope you don’t mind. I hope you’re happy out there because I think I’m finding that for myself too, despite all of this chaos. It’s crazy, isn’t it? All of those jokes we made about The Future with a capital-F over text, speculating until we just couldn’t anymore. Turning up the stereo volume instead. I loved the way you made me feel.