summer is right where we left it

a kiss and go for the sticky season

Will anything on earth feel as good as sun on skin? As ripened fruit bursting with juice? The fade of summer is as promised as its bloom, yet it always arrives so abruptly. As an evolutionary advantage, summer pumps me with hormones that make me forget the nights spent sweating, the crowds of mosquitoes, and the thickness of the air. My memories are replaced and renamed if they don’t serve the season kindly. That wasn’t a sunburn you suffered; it was a kiss from the ether, and you were lucky to get it. You will miss these nights when winter comes to chill your bones.

Summer is always at risk of being spent. You can’t waste it. You better take advantage of it while it’s here, because in a second it will be gone. They forget to mention that summer will come again, and everything will buzz and swell and erupt like it always does, and the only thing you need is patience. As a child, you felt the earth and paid respect to the inchworms; they are still there to greet you if you go to them. Everything is right where you left it next June.

There are places in Europe that empty out when August comes, off to revel in the way the ocean meets the shore. It is the most marvelous thing the American mind can think of. I sit on the seventh floor of an office building and watch summer through the window. The glare of the sun obstructs the view of my screen. I should be syncing my diet to her gardens, preparing a meal that can only taste this sweet in this season. I am eating a chicken salad wrap from a plastic box.

On the subway I sink deeper and deeper underground. The sun is starting to dip, and I don’t watch it slip behind the buildings; I burrow deeper and darker still. The heat is wilting businessmen like flowers as I squish between their suits. Everybody stares just beyond each other. This shared experience requires the balancing act of respecting someone’s space while pretending they don’t exist. I am extremely aware of where my body ends, and someone else’s begins. When our sweat-drenched arms bump each other we don’t apologize.

I escape the city and go upstate. People in the city are delighted when they are reminded that upstate exists. Even if they have no plans to go themselves, they love to hear that you are going and getting out of the city for a bit. I drive through a storm and arrive in a familiar and dark room. I spend the night opening my eyes and closing them. There is no light pollution out in the woods, and therefore I can barely tell the difference between the two. As rhythmic as a heartbeat, the frogs and crickets chorus outside. They tell me that even though I am falling asleep, they are finding time to sing.

I find time to sit outside the next day, hoping this eases their minds. I am lying on the dock, letting the sun melt me into the planks. I drip through the cracks into the lake, and then I am swallowed like the watered-down sip at the bottom of my glass. There is nothing more exquisite than the velvet of the lake. I wonder if I will forever feel this small as I lie on my back and stare at the same sky I always do. I think it is promised somewhere in summer that I will.