Wishing for Summer: A Fool's Game

One morning soon we will awake to stuck sheets and still air abuzz with cicadas and HVAC engines. The quiet of a summer evening will deafen us.

We'll stand by the windows before sunrise just to luxuriate in the moment of relief that dies bloody red and sweaty at dawn.

We'll have burnt calluses on our fingertips from baked steering wheels and we'll have icy white knuckles when the AC finally blows cold on our hands, direct from the vents.

We'll think back to slow days of ice and snow and sweatshirts and heaters and extra socks.

Misery is so forgiving.

We'll fight the sweat slick skin between our toes where the band aide won't stay and the flip flop thong has flayed our feet.

We'll sit in the cool cinema at noon and squint and blink when we walk back out into the broiling parking lot at three.

It's coming. There's no stopping the endless orange and yellow of weather maps crying with exclamation points about the consecutive days of heat, the fire danger, the drought.

There's no avoiding these inevitable woes, but we have some few days yet.

April is the cruellest month

Reminding us that we will sweat out, the old will die, the young will phase to strange fruit-punch-mouthed ice pop eaters.

Their blue, green, purple, orange tongues a foreshadow to each new disease the artificial dyes, sun lotions, and cold potions will conjure one distant day.

As we squint under a too-bright sun at the harry and hurry of too-bright people, collectively we recall the misery of monochrome months.

We remember gray sweatshirts, gray skies, and slushy gray streets. The cars wore gray coats of grime while out feet stayed in the same gray socks for days because it was just too cold to take them off.

Soon, we become chameleons: orange and brown and red to match the toxic air, the dead land, and the hot blood of scraped knees.

Soon, we shuffle layer upon layer of old skins and see how misshapen we have become.

Soon we will think fondly of those days when we complained and wished for the halcyon days of summer.

We were fools to dream so.

Those days will last too long with junebugs and mosquitoes and where did all the fireflies go?

We'll be so tired before each day has even contemplated folding up her blue blanket and packing it away to wait impatiently, fingers tapping at the horizons (both at once), for the new day.

But the children will play on past dusk and can't we stay up late? But going to bed only means you have to set up the coffee pot and face the rumpled sheets that make you feel dirty right after your third tepid shower.

If only you could stop sweating for five-no-three minutes! My god when did this become the sole desire of a day?

Irritation sets in.

And those people half our age with blue slurpee tongues and vodka breath complain that they don't "git" half the things we say.

So we remember and make note of how much less stupid we were back when, but we can't blame them, considering the way kids are dragged through the world these days instead of brought up in loving homes like we were.

And then I tell you the story we both know by heart about getting in trouble for laughing in the house or screaming in a game outside.

I tell you about the bonfire when I cried and my innocence was exterminated, and you tell me all things change.

I correct you, "Things fall apart."

If only we still had that energy and if the heat didn't make us hurry up the season of death with fervent wishes, and if winter didn't hurt so bad-- deep in the bone hurt... If only, think of what this world COULD be.

It is only meet and right that we blame those who pull the cup from us before our thirsts are quenched, just as our progenitors blamed us.

But that man who blames himself, his generation, for creating this mess you and I inherited: the wold where summer angers killed Jack, Bobby, and Mr. King before my eyes were opened-- One man knows what's what.

Is one enough?

The seasons count off the rampages of civilizations on their fingers.

They're older than we and will still be infants when we are extinct.

Winter snows will cover our graves and spring flowers will bloom from our putrid remains.

Summer will see our mighty works baked to dust, and autumn winds will blow the remains of this world away with the fallen leaves.

Somewhere in the detritus, a human tooth, some wrought metal. Plastic. Only this remains.

We fade but our hubris lingers on, like the mighty warning carved in stone upon the empty desert.

The seasons, the broken trash, and if we are lucky, the words, too, will last to the last spin of this globe.

All of these dreads are in my head as I lie in bed wondering if life might be simpler if I could be dead before April kisses us (wetly) goodbye.