CRUEL SUMMER

I.

• New York City •

The singer watches the cab peel away from the curb.

She stands unmoving, trying not to give in to the urge to run after it; pretending as though her heels are cemented into the concrete beneath them, pretending the summer sun is blazing above her, pretending her heart might swell and burst through her chest.

She knows, of course, that none of this is true. The sky is covered in a blanket of wool and the air bites at her skin like an ice cube sliding down her back. Her heels are not stuck and her heart is dried up and lacking its color like the leaves scattered around her.

She gazes up at the street sign, her cornflower eyes softening as they meet the white letters.

At one point they had been familiar; like each of the creaks in her apartment floor or the permanent callus on the side of her index finger from playing the guitar for nineteen years.

Like the voice that spoke the words created from those white letters, on a day that now felt like a lifetime ago.

Back then, she was known as Taylor Swift: The Serial Dater. The twenty-five-year-old country-turned-pop singer who was shattering industry records while simultaneously running through lovers like a train. For every new guy there would be the subject of her next project, her next breakup, her next album, and then not too long after that, her next award.

Boyfriend, new project, breakup, album complete, award.

Rinse and repeat.

As far as the world knew, this was her formula. As though Taylor Swift, The Serial Dater, had not been a person, but a profit scheme grown in a test tube.

As far as the world knew on that day from a lifetime ago, she had been dating the anticipated subject of her sixth album. This would have made sense, of course, per the formula. She had just won Album of the Year for her fifth record and the rinse cycle was just beginning.

But on that brutal August day, Adam Wiles, her subject, was on the other side of the country. The six-foot-two Scottish man was at a nightclub in Los Angeles. She had no idea what he was doing then, nor any of the times that they were apart. It should have bothered her, but it was hard to be irritated by someone she forgot about as soon as he walked out the door.

What the world didn't know was that Taylor Swift, The Serial Dater, had been following a different formula that summer.

One that involved a six-foot blonde and a garden gate.

She had memorized the number of steps from her door to the gate. One thousand three hundred and twenty-six. She had also memorized the pattern of the traffic lights, the trees in which the cicadas sang the loudest and the feeling of balmy summer night air licking her skin.

The first time felt scandalous. The second, just as daring. The third, invigorating. And every time after that, the feeling only intensified. By the fifteenth trip from her apartment to the garden gate, her heart would drum with anticipation. Excitement would fill her to the brim like water accidentally filling her lungs as she dove into a swimming pool. It was nasty and frightening, yet the exhilaration was all it took to make it an addiction.

One summer night, one thousand three hundred and twenty six steps, the garden gate.

Rinse and repeat.

The formula had always stayed the same.

But her feelings were another story.

Each time she snuck into the garden gate her heart felt heavier than the last. One more fever dream of a night, one more morning she woke up feeling every shade of blue. Every night was more desperate than the one before. For her to follow the formula meant for her to fill the void hidden inside of her, only it drained twice as quickly.

As the nights stacked up, the space between their clandestine meetings narrowed. The more frequent they became, the more quickly she walked. She hung her head low as she crossed the blocks between her apartment and the gate and in a way it felt like walking a tightrope. One wrong step, one curious eye catching on, and they would screw it up without even trying. Every night she made it to the other side of the rope it felt as though she was yet again sealing her fate. That she may not have died, but it was only a matter of time.

Then one night, she didn't take the one thousand three hundred and twenty six steps.

She was in the back of a yellow taxi, the subject of her formula seated across from her. They had left a dive bar on the Lower East Side and were heading back to the place every night of that cruel summer took them. She was drunk, and as she watched the streetlights flash across the other blonde's profile it hit her that this routine was going to end. There were only so many times you could wash a t-shirt before its color faded. Only so many clandestine meetings or stolen stares one could take before the pain of the undefined was too much to keep holding on to. It would have to die, unless she found the courage to say the only words that could possibly keep it alive.

In the back of the cab, she had started to cry. The words felt like poison in the pit of her stomach; something she knew would have been better to just keep down and would eventually pass like all of the other nights she managed not to say them. But that night, the bile was shooting up her throat and there was no stopping them. As soon as the other blonde noticed her crying, the words flooded out like the rain during a perfect storm.

"I love you!"

"Isn't that the worst thing you've ever heard?"

But the words weren't enough.

A year later, Taylor Swift, The Serial Dater, was officially dead. Officially, because she didn't only die once. That was the thing about illicit affairs. Each time she left the garden gate, making sure no one saw her leave, a little part of her died. Then another. Then another and another and a million little times after that, until eventually every piece of Taylor Swift, The Serial Dater, was officially gone.

The Serial Dater, who had thought she had finally found the one.

A year later, she stands at the end of Cornelia Street. She can hear the blonde's laughter in her mind as though she's coming towards her from the other end of the block. Perhaps it had only been what it was. A drug that only worked the first few hundred times. But there had been something pulling her when she stepped into the cab. After escaping to the Lakes for the past year, it was as though a magnetic force—or fate—had brought her back to this very spot.

But that's what happens when a person shows you colors you never thought you could see.

When they teach you a secret language that only the two of you can speak.

Look at this idiotic fool that you made me, she would say as soon as the other blonde unlocked the gate.

She knows damn well that she's about to ruin herself for the millionth time.

The sky is now becoming dark as she slowly turns on her heels and begins to walk in the direction of the gate. Despite how long it had been, her heart starts to drum in that familiar rhythm of anticipation. She's imagining the look on the other blonde's face when she sees her. All it would take is one single glance and she'd be screaming, Look at this godforsaken mess that you made me!

She's only a few steps away and can feel the mercurial high already building. She spots the gate and suddenly her withered heart has tripled in size.

She approaches the iron framework and places her hand on the familiar handle.

But then suddenly, she freezes.

Her heart, only seconds ago threatening to burst out of her chest, collapses.

Right next to the bunch of daisies by the mailbox, there is a wooden post.

The sign nailed into it reads, For Sale.