Oh Summer, I’ve never felt like you were designed for me.
Every June I feel you creeping closer and closer. Everybody seems to be buying bathing suits and drinking wine and sitting in your warm rays, uncovering their skin for you, getting ready, calling friends on the phone whilst sitting on park benches, bare legs swinging in the sun. These people on park benches, they must be planning barbecues, they must be cruising through the city on pale yellow scooters, their hair flowing in the warm breeze, clinging onto each other.
I go to the market to observe. I text five friends because I cannot go somewhere alone (just not today). I buy a baguette. The five friends have plans. They must belong to the Park Bench People. I bring my baguette home, shut my windows and long for quiet. I long for the sounds of a crowded beach, for a friend laughing, leaning their head onto my shoulder, I long for not longing for anything at all. I long for everything at once. I go out into the community garden. There is no community between the two flats where the garden is sat but there is space to have one.
Oh Summer, I can’t wait for you to lazily flow into Autumn, the pinks and oranges in your golden hour clouds leaking into the trees and leaves trickling down from them. But you are still here now, warm and everlasting. I’m pretending to be a statue in the community lacking garden. I’m going out after all (I’ve just decided). I’m finding a park bench to sit on.
