The Best Melons in the World

Beyoncé started a Tumblr around this time, and I have to admit I looked. Private snapshots from a life on an entirely different planet: her running through some glowing tunnel that probably cost more to build than my apartment block, eating what the caption implied were the world’s greatest melons with the body language of someone for whom that’s an unremarkable Tuesday, getting boob impressions pressed into beach sand somewhere I couldn’t afford to look at on a map.

I’d genuinely never thought much about what Beyoncé and Jay-Z get up to on their days off. One of them is obscenely rich; so is the other. That covered it. But then the photos make the wealth specific. It stops being an abstract number and starts being: running through tunnels, eating fruit, pressing yourself into sand. And the thing that actually gets you isn’t the luxury—it’s the complete absence of self-consciousness about it. Not performing the lifestyle for the camera. Just living it and occasionally documenting it. That’s the real distance. Not the money. The ease.

Not jealous at all. Completely fine. Just dreaming quietly that our time is coming, and when it does, we’ll have our own platform, and we’ll post our own candid snaps, and they’ll be almost as good as the melons.