How to cope with end of summer anxiety? Create your own axiom and tattoo it to your forehead. Have it sound something like, “Vacation is a state of mind.”
Wear turquoise beads over your harsh turtlenecks. Keep colorful scarves tied into your hair. Bring your beach bag into January; your belongings could use the friendship. Become one with a third-party iPhone snapshot of paella and make it at home. Create a slow burn on your kitchen stove and then write it off as sun exposure.
Let your eyes get lost in an ocean that is so g-dang turquoise, you’re almost sure that it’s a pool.
The next time you find yourself maniacally reading reviews of the new bronzer you need to try as a result of the unique tint of green your February skin has once again assumed, look back into your phone’s archive and remember you’ll get tan again.
Mentally archive outfits that require bathing suit bottoms but eschew pants. Poke flowers into your ear holes, white sunglass frames onto your face.
Get ambitiously lost in fiercely short swim trunks. Call them swim trunks because you can.
Overworked people are always extolling the virtues of vacation. These people seem to think that what it takes to rejuvenate oneself is as simple as sand between your toes and that raw, so-bad-it’s-good fry that you feel against your skin after a long day, half naked and outdoors.
They’re not wrong about the simplicity — but you don’t need a beach, a physical vacation to unwind all the time. Sometimes a travel diary will do it.
Still I propose the following: shut your phone, then shut your eyes. Expect to share that no one can or will reach you for, let’s say 48-hours to start. Now kick down that popular Pinterest meme that wants you to do something that scares the shit out and instead venture to a reliably happy place. Are your eyes still closed?
Don’t open them!
I realized earlier this summer that it takes immersing your whole self in a body of water to truly feel like it’s summer, and we want to feel like it’s summer constantly because summer is like the longest, warmest Christmas break of all time, right?
You can open your eyes now.
Draw a bath.
Take off your clothes.
Get in said both and close your eyes again.
Immerse!
And you still have 46 hours to yourself.
Make them count
And don’t forget
Vacation isn’t over until your Instagram photos say it is.
Photographed by Leandra Medine.
