Summer is a Fickle Woman and Broken Dreams

            A certain bittersweet air enveloped summer; whether it was induced by the humidity—by the white-bottomed leaves that hardly shifted an inch from sun-up to sun-down—was unbeknownst to me. It was certainly though, a season of great mystery. A restlessness—a great desire to do something, feeling like the sharp, dry August grass on bare feet. Yet it was with filled that nostalgia—the kind that touched the bones, the eyelids, the moment the sunshine gently roused you from sleep with its silent ways. It was a kind of reflective sadness, like the groggy face looking in the screen-covered window, and out at the yard below, all wide-open spaces and endless waves of heat. It sounded like the hard-working hum of the air conditioner, only shutting off during careful increments at sudden, allowing the air to be filled with the desperate, lonely cries of the cicadas as they waited for the completion of their short life.

            It was watermelon dripping down the legs of, whilst baking in the heat with a quirky family—a family who was slowly beginning to reveal their misgivings and insecurities and mysterious pasts, like peeling back the crusty cocoon of a butterfly. It was I, in the middle, the product of their protection and love and companionship. I could venture upon my thoughts and see that my naïveté and innocence and ignorance was their cause—I simply the afflicted. And it was felt to me in the wandering, blank mind, gifted no longer with fantasy worlds but questions of this one.

            Summer was a reproach, an observation, an idea—I wanted to dwell on one single one, but couldn’t pin it down. It was campfires and roasted marshmallows, mosquitoes and late nights and made-up constellations. Bittersweet, nostalgic, yet completely and totally out of reach. Summer was this—all this—and yet something always felt missing. Like a puzzle piece.

            An ambition, a list, a vow—instead spent making the money you felt you didn’t need. Sore backs, a paycheque, a foul mood earned, and a queer anticipation to return to the stifling, hastily-constructed walls of the school so that one might escape that nagging thought, lost and drowned in labour.

            Summer was a “not much” in teenage vocabulary—nothing spectacular. Just another memory, dust-covered as old books in a few months. A thought never unveiled. There, but hard to pin-point. It was a mystery; as fickle as the old woman who turned up regular at the restaurant in gaudy old earrings like anchors that weighed her earlobes down—always ordering the same thing because it was safe. Safe—but never satisfying. Just something to whet the appetite; to dull the pang. The pang like the growth spurt I’d just picked myself back up from.

            It was that throbbing thought, an incessant pulse; a broken dream, a desire to leave, and the shattered pieces of a would-be summer.