İnci
on being frightened 80's style
I grew up in an apartment complex in a country where the
summers are really very very hot.
The kind of hot where the asphalt streets often melt in the
city and after nights in which you feel like you can’t breathe the thick air
you wake up all sticky and sweaty in the mornings.
So people either bought AC’s and got on with their lives or
summer houses outside the city to spend the worst months on the cool seaside.
Houses facing the beach, where swarms of kids laid on the hot sand after
cooling off in the sea, played beach ball, ate ice cream, flirted with their
first summer loves, played pinball in the chilly evenings, stayed up late at
night… When school started you could tell who had a summer house; those kids
looked so enviably tanned and happy. You had no choice but to be jealous.
We didn’t have a summer house. We stayed in our apartment
until the end of August when we went to visit my grandparents who lived in
another country not so hot.
So I didn’t have great, fun, happy summers at the beach but
I had an older sister who liked to torture me. You know, stuff that older
sisters do. She used to push the elevator’s stop button and jump around to make
the cabin shake until I went into a meltdown. She often told me I was adopted
and encouraged me to find my real parents and so on. It was crucial for me not
to do as she wanted, not to crack. I remember often feeling like I needed to
prove how brave and cool I am.
There were other kids in our street who didn’t go on vacation
neither. Either because their families had to work or simply didn’t have the
money to travel. We used to spend every single day together in the streets, and
when it got too hot to be outside we rented videotapes (because that’s what
people did back then) and watched them at someone’s home. I was the youngest
one in the group, so it happened that in these summers, although very much under
age, I started watching an awful lot of horror movies.
