Today’s letter is in partnership with our friends at CHANEL Beauty. If you would like to work with The Love List, please email abby@bigheart.media.
You’re barefoot in the kitchen of a house party, holding a sweaty spritz, when the screen door creaks open. There’s a vibe shift. Maybe a certain song comes on, or it’s a whiff of the ocean riding in on somebody’s air-dried locks. Your nostrils flare to tell you that every peach in the bowl has gone suddenly ripe. The screen door slaps shut and snaps you back into the moment. That lift in the chest you feel? That’s a summer crush, baby. And I’d argue it’s our greatest annual promise of eternal youth.
In the open-wide road between hoping and promising lives the warm hug of possibility. Love is a mansion with a mortgage – she’s heavy and grown-up; she asks for commitment and the sobriety of reality. A good flirt is just that creaky door left open on a hot summer night; anything can wander on in.
I haven’t fallen for anybody except myself this summer, but I found myself yearning for that familiar lingering feeling – just a whiff of something crushable that stays long after I put myself to bed. When early July knocked the wind out of me, I drove east, holding a steering wheel in one hand and my chest in the other. I drove until the pines gave over to dune grass and the air flipped to salt, thinking about the ripe fruit at the farm stands and the float of jasmine from well-tended gardens. I drove, and I drove, until I hit my favorite little town on the South Fork.
The evening light in Amagansett comes down like honey off a comb — gooey, slow, sorta sticky and glazed. A shingled dive bar on Main Street has outlived anything that ever dared it, and there’s a restaurant whose walls open up to the street to let the seaside air blow through. The ocean at Indian Wells Beach rocks my heart like a newborn. I have the windows down, music up, feeling like a bird set free.
An East Coast summer runs on the same gas as something at Chanel, because I’ve been dousing myself in COCO MADEMOISELLE CRUSH ABSOLU this season. Its fumes encapsulate that same optimism of a crush. It pulls the armor off of everything, so we open our bodies and bare our skin. The season is short, but the days are so long they feel recklessly borrowed against winter. We scoot in close for the ride, and our thighs stick to the seats.
COCO MADEMOISELLE CRUSH ABSOLU feels like the nose of my very being right now; free, irresistible, indelible. It opens on grapefruit and lychee, bright as that first look across the room, sweet with a little impertinence. As you tuck deeper into your evening, it warms into a heartbeat of rose and jasmine, and underneath, low and patient as a July night, runs a woody-ambery base that lingers like a great kiss.
Long after you’ve left a room, some part of you is still in it. Chanel calls this the irresistible force of attraction: perhaps not zeroed in on a person, but a feeling – like unforgettable days spent out East and the acute feeling of your own aliveness.
The remainder of August holds a loose calendar and this bottle riding shotgun in a canvas bag between sunscreen and a paperback. When I climb into my sun-baked car, I can smell a faint hint of it still hanging out in the upholstery. It’s an olfactory trigger I’ll always assign to these weeks, weeks that belong to whatever wants to have its way with me next.
The object of a crush is always fleeting anyway, right? The song ends, the handsome stranger gets on the cannonball back to the city. What remains is the discovery that you can still be taken by surprise.
