actual summer
on the end of summer & summers spent at home
In only one way, it’s a replica of the previous summers. The same sweltering heat clings to my body, stripping it off its will and ardor. I bend to it, let its orbs of sunlight and beads of sweat carry the blame for my melancholy. Though I know. The stifling atmosphere is but one common factor, the temperature only a vague concealer to all the other differences.
Humidity is a haze that looms outside my window. Threatening to seep through the crack under the door from which daylight is peeking. Rays that seem to seek my skin. Rays that I can’t drink in, like I used to, on the sands of the past years.
This summer I’m an observer, a poor excuse of a vacationer. I lounge lazily on my couch. Can I summon a screen of cerulean sea into existence? Build up the pixels into a vast moistness that swallows my body from within walls?
I worry my fingertips will wilt from swiping through photos that invoke my envy, leave me a failure at mustering any bit of satisfaction.
This season is supposed to be sticky neon fruits, their juice staining my knuckles. The sultry atmosphere: dry curls and pearly froth. Grains under nails and the hot kisses of my aunts upon my rose tinted cheeks.
But I lie in months exploited by boredom. Shooing away faint mirages of moths, neglecting the thrum of my bones towards travel. My outline desperately resists its home, etching to abandon it. The way knowing and being known so well can sometimes make you crave foreignness, unfamiliarity.
I slather cranberry jam on fragments of stale bread, attempting to conjure up my version of July sweetness. The kitchen bulb laminates the side of my face, capturing its weariness in a dull yellow. I pry open one cashew after another and reminisce on a time when the sun similarly peeled my layers apart, allowing me to shed the unpleasant parts of my nature in a pile on the airport floor.
Wasn’t summer just a resurrection of innocence? A season of youthful glee and liberty unfurling against a shore
A flare of a tranquil existence where you’re not required to dismantle a worry.
I dread facing the dwindling trees of autumn, confronting the winds of winter just yet. I don’t seem able to pass through them without the tanned gauze on my shoulders, the immunity of my home country’s mocktail sips.
There’s no abundance of freckles huddling on my nose. I haven’t earned the honeyed complexion of the holiday. This season hasn’t left its mark on me, a wisp of time carried like a breath. Diluted and irretrievable.
August was always a threshold, a way of passage from idleness to duty. We’re yet again standing at the precipice off which we tumble into routine, fall into place. The days that seem to endlessly stretch start to wane, they lose hue and solidify under the throb of pressure.
Still, I’m grateful for the summer solstice this year. For the flickers of joy among exile. The chance at solitude and poring over pages, the casual drawl of conversation. Already I’m in a state of waiting, a patience that promises to last till next June.
A sickly hope for an actual summer, a better one, next year.