The Beautiful and the Damned

In these endless Summer days I tend to lose myself in the beauty of December. There is so much to be grateful for, so much to just let oneself revel in. However, the smell of sunblock on my lightly tanned skin (an overstatement if ever there was one) and the pleasures of a light Cape breeze caressing my sunburn do little to quell my thirst for a socialite-style adventure: a Summer aboard a yacht with champagne (no sparkling wine in sight please) or a dalliance in the deep blue of somewhere exotic, or even Pacific.

I have enjoyed every one of my Eastern Cape summer vacations: two months letting loose in the barefoot province brings one to a place of soulful rejuvenation. However, nearing the age of twenty-three and not having left the country yet (I have sojourned as far as Cape Town and Johannesburg) is eroding the happiness that I feel I should be having this Summer.

In the midst of my Mid-Summer Crisis, I have found refuge in the unparalleled sophistication of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Trawling through the library, I have devoured Gatsby (this is the fourth time), The Beautiful and the Damned, and now, am making my way through a rather thick volume of his short stories (all 700 pages of them)!

And while indulging my imagination's desire to create a visceral world of decadence, style and opulence (in a Versaci one-piece of course) in "The Off Shore Pirate", I came upon this quote which most aptly sums up my current predicament.

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

There is a slippage that takes place when one does something for the first time, a falling into something that one will never be able to extrapolate oneself out of, for having done something, it can never be undone - and so lies the beauty in teenage experimentation.

I will never be able to take those first daring sips of vodka under a ripened moon in a garden smelling like lavender and jasmine again. I could try and recreate that exact moment of being sixteen and feeling rebellious, excited at misbehaving, but I am 22, and by virtue of these extra six years, allowed in every State in every country in the entire world, to consume alcohol.

And so I leave you with a few images that, despite their sentimentality, encapsulate the delightful feeling of slipping and falling in a serendipitous world of beauty and sensation and love.