A Brief and Wandering Prologue to Summer

Though it’s early in the season, I am already beginning to feel the summer time. It has a sort of salt-smell, I think, but maybe it’s my imagination. I love it in a vague way, and the long days blurred together with heat and the smell of air conditioning and warm skin and apples in the morning, the barely-aware consciousness I adapt when Monday Tuesday Wednesday have no meaning. In the back of my mind I love these ambiguous months, all smeared with shades of long walks and itchy grass and hot gravel; of fireflies and sunburn and swimming. Of trail rides on my painted horse. He shies at the oil pumps sometimes, but after a moment of hesitation marches quickly towards them with an almost hostile determination, like Don Quixote toward his windmill-giants. He’ll put out his long square nose to touch one, and flare his nostrils as he makes contact with the corroded metal. He’ll swing his head down and trumpet an offended snort, then coldly ignore the steely creature and all the rest of its kind as we pass through them in the field. I let him walk where he likes; the summer mellows him and I can ride with a looser rein.

The summer mellows me too, a little, calms with steady heat the sparks and twitching in my panicky brain.

I was going to build a tree house. Every summer I said I would; every summer I thought I would. And every summer was one more tree still empty of a house, save the nests of birds and squirrels. One more season closer to now, when I am far too old for building tree houses.
Sometimes I think I’m going to build one—sometimes I think I’m going to do a lot of things—but the tiredness breaks on me like a wave, tumbling, swallowing me up and I sink into it, smothered by it. I sit beneath its weight and wish and wonder about things missed and things undone. Watch too much tv and just waiting for my body to loosen the bonds it’s placed on itself, to let me get on with my life.

I don’t feel very lovely when I’m tired. Hair unbrushed and limp, yesterday’s sweat pants, dark circles under my eyes, soft body curled up underneath an oversized t-shirt. It takes so much effort, the pursuit of “beauty”. It exhausts me. And for what? We try so hard to make it so that all can see our bones; pierce new holes in our flesh to hang sparkly things from. We smear colored dust on our faces, paint blood red lips, black rings around our eyes; the war paint of modern society. It seems even the most culturally accepted fashions are rather macabre. But then, so are we, so I suppose it makes sense. Either way we’re expected to join in the scramble, to pretend to care. Just pretend, though, because God help you if you care too much.

I’d like to think that we’re better than this, but sometimes I look around and think maybe we’re exactly where we belong. Though it hasn’t felt like home to me in quite some time, so maybe not. I don’t know about you, but I belong other places, at least sometimes. Though I never seem to be in those places at the times I feel like I belong in them.

I realize now that in my mind I’ve reduced us down to an idea, some memories and some songs, like dimly flickering scenes from a movie I saw once but I can’t remember how it ended. Maybe it didn’t end at all. Or maybe it was a dream.