Summer Heartbreak

Summer, for me, is the season of feeling that particular sense of the unreachable. It’s a feeling familiar to me anytime of year, across seasons in the quiet stillness of a grey day, in the fleetingness of golden daybreak, or at the brink of a dark purple dusk. But it shows up most intensely here in the showiness and brazenness of summer. When the trilling of cicadas in the heat and humidity of 2 o’clock meets the forgiving gentleness of evening’s embrace- an embrace that teasingly erases what seemed indelible about the day until tomorrow’s 2 o’clock. It’s the season when that unreachable thing feels closest, like butterfly kisses in the palms of my open hands. So close, that even for a moment I feel I can hold it, but it flies away before I can keep it. The beauty of the world without its ugliness, a timelessness where every summer memory and the one that’s currently unfolding merge into one ceaseless existence. Summer is the season when a tangibility of something intangible feels practically possible, perceptible as form instead of only formlessness. But it’s its closeness here in summer that burns away my naïveté that I might be able to hold any of it as mine to keep. Summer shares her brazen glory and glamour only as much as I’m willing to not hold on too tightly- only as much as I’m willing to let my heart break at the perfection of the greying hair on my dog’s face and the passing colour palates of a summer sky. I’ve learned this from the way a day feels shorter, or the way I’ve cheated myself of the preciousness of it all when I’m grasping to keep what’s not mine to keep- when a futile and fearful arrogance wants me to believe I can defy Nature and stow it all away somehow to sustain me at a time when the beauty of the world doesn’t feel quite as close. Summer is the season of an embodiment of yearning, in my humanness, but also on display in the fullness of the trees and the sound of the wind blowing through them. Here, in summer, Nature shows off her gorgeous and aching paradox- our longing for something that we only long for because we cannot have it, we cannot hold it, we cannot make it our own, because we are made of it ourselves.