Written By: Gin Moon
Summers long gone, I was a free spirit in a free body and all the world was my playground.
Summers gone by, I walked barefoot in fresh grass and felt the earth respond to my presence.
Summers ago, I lost my daughter to a defect of my own creation.
Summers ago, I closed my eyes and missed the artery. Oozing not spurting, I got my seven stitches and a certified diagnosis, but no relief.
Between the summer and me lies a great jumbled afghan of misunderstanding, threaded through with a splintering twine of reflection. Full of potential, full of regret.
Together, we fail the children.
Once a coveted 12 weeks deserving of excitement and reverie, summer has become an extension of all other seasons. One work day after another, sweat and grease and shortages of time melding into a humid, human hot pot of disappointment. Welcome to the grown-up world.
'Can we go swimming?' They nag. 'It's sooo hot.'
Undeniably, they are correct. It is hot. So hot the sticking sweat of my newly fat thighs makes me once again question my decision to quit smoking cigarettes. I refuse to seek refuge in the air conditioning of my bedroom; it would feel like betrayal. We must suffer together.
More than anything, summer has become a time when great things are expected, but rarely experienced. The summer promises much but delivers little. Fleeting and fickle, summer comes and goes, an overbearing episode of manic sun broil, freckled with truly nice days that really shove the stick in the shit-kabob. I can't help but feel a connection. A child of the summer, a creature of the sun and the moon, birthed in a sweat-soaked hippie loft, blood-soaked sheets drying in the sun, wilting away like the lettuce leaves of my unrealized potential, shedding one unproductive layer after another.
'Can we go somewhere? It's sooo boring.'
They say boring, I say relaxing. I say relaxing, when I mean that all the energy I was able to muster up today oozed out my feet while I stood on them for eight hours.
I say my feet hurt, when I mean that I have negative fifty dollars in the bank and don't get paid again for two weeks and even going somewhere free costs gas.
I say I'm broke, when I mean that this depression inside me is bubbling up in the heat and I'm swallowing angst like tic tacs and this emotional restlessness is immobilizing.
Summer's gone by, lazy days laced with apologies, no rest for the weary, no respite for the restless.
Summer's long gone; I was a free spirit.