Summer is descending softly.

May is flirting with June as her sunlight lingers in the air until 9pm.

Neighbors stroll by slowly, drinks in hand, as music plays somewhere in the distance. They sit on each other’s stoops as kids draw with chalk on the sidewalks. And the fashion. Oh my god the fashion. Colorful outfits on every corner. Bubblegum puffy sleeves and chartreuse skirts. Ballet flats and sandals. Funky sunglasses. Hipsters holding iced oat milk lattes as they fly by on skateboards and little kids clutching ice cream cones. I’ve never experienced winter or how ecstatically Spring ushers it away. How the joy radiates, spreads, and infects you. Time becomes elastic in it’s abundance. Daylight never-ending.

I saw a quote the other day by Martha Gellhorn that read I wait every year for summer, and it is usually good, but it is never as good as that summer I am always waiting for.

I was born in the summertime but I have never been one for summer. I was raised in Southern California, the land of eternal summer, and still, I loathed it for reasons I tried year after year to dissect. This quote is as close to an answer as I ever arrived at.

Summer is stupidly idyllic. Gorgeously unreal. The days are long and lazy and sweet. Your hair is always wet and your clothing is always minimal and fruit has never tasted so good. You feel young in the summer in all of the ways that the winter makes you feel old. You have sun-kissed skin and tangled hair and a light read in your lap. And maybe that’s wonderful. But maybe you’re like me. Maybe there is something haunting about that much sunlight, that much pressure to be sunny yourself. Maybe you also find that there is something latent in those ice creams cones and cumulus clouds that feels melancholic.

Nostalgic.

There is a silence to summer. A stillness in the air. You feel as if you should be doing something summer-esque all the time. Going on vacation or to the beach or sitting outside with friends until the sun sets at 10pm. You feel that it is a time to be happy. And maybe you really are happy. I am. But still, as Gellhorn expressed, summer has a way of making you feel that you could be happier. That you should be, because look at this world.

There’s always this pressure to go out with your friends or fall in love. Why else does every cheesy movie and book have summer written into the title? Not only is it the ideal backdrop for a love story, but it’s also consistently a great metaphor for coming of age. Summer is always used as a period of transition. You enter it one way and you leave another.

Each year as August droops into September, you feel older. Time looses the elasticity that July granted it and suddenly you feel that you have lost so much of it. You try to remember where June ended and July began but it all blurs together like the candy colors you watch drain from the late-summer sky.

Bubblegum pink, creamsicle orange. Purple grape and cherry red.

Pick your favorite. It will linger under your tongue all winter.

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