stagnant summer

June is white-hot in your eyes, always, beating down on your porch with an iron fist, almost as though to remind you of how defenseless you are when the universe begins to move. an occupational hazard, it appears to say, of living in a world where the difference between being ant and being human sometimes appears to be less of a miracle and more of a coin-toss between what-we-could-have-been, what-we-are, what-we-should-have-been, and what-could-have-been-done.

i would love to tell you it gets less confusing as you grow older, that growing older is tantamount to being given a map that tells you how to escape your labyrinth, lefts and rights and fronts and backs dotted clearly in red ink. i would like to tell you that June only beats on porches out of anger, because it is tired of being caught in an eternal loop, of waking up every morning to an unchanging face.

but that would be a lie.

because growing older is an allegory warped and twisted so thoroughly that it is impossible to untangle the individual threads. if we are tantamount to anything, it is the uncertainty of the weather cock on shingle and stone, where a single blizzard sends it spiralling into confusion. you are your labyrinth, the minotaur that inhabits it. your shirtsleeves are soaked with sun in June haze, eyes dim-lit and lanterns swinging in the wake of unblinking pupils. there is so much you long to see--but the airs we breathe are stagnant, and full of drivel.

i tell you June is Hephaestus, that it pounds out of necessity, that when the universe dances, it is less spontaneous than we are. in your eyes, the universe is chance, but i have learned to believe that chance is a sequestration of things that were meant to be, that time is a passage of events i shall never understand. flies buzz, the sky sweats, the birds pause mid-air as if to breathe in the silence of a sunset that smothers the sun. you tell me that tomorrow will be a better day. that there is always a drawing of breath after an exhalation, a storm to silence, a monsoon to every swamp.

but, darling, i long to say,
i am a quagmire.

i am caught between a standstill and a sea,
between child and adult,
a tightrope strung lax between two hills,
a rocky mountain range
where every drop is sheer,
and every plateau
is endless.

[time never ceases
                      to haunt me.]