This was summer. This was summer in all its glory, full-throated and poignant, none of autumn’s fine cool light or springtime’s indistinct haze. This was brassy sunshine and the turn of a young girl’s ankle in the grass — beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. His hand between my frail bare shoulder blades and the sun-warmed bronze of my summer-skin, nights that came too early and left too soon. The world was coming up verdant and green, the sky wild and disordered with stars, and around us a lonely city breathed light.
I was so tired of living in a place where we condemned all that we couldn’t understand. I loved him but he did not love me: the beginnings of a dozen different songs, each sweeter and softer than the last. I had the words but not the voice, no melody with which to sing them. So I held them inside, rib cage forced full of hollow space, every inhalation a rhythm.
I remember the way the light fell lurid and golden, the loam soft beneath my feet. This is how it always will be, he was telling me. You will never be free. You will always fall for him and he will always ruin you — you will always emerge as something less than you were before. Summer in its loveliness, so solemn and so sad, the bittersweetness of it all in the back of my throat. It ached, and it was beautiful, and I missed him terribly: brassy gold hair soft as a fawn’s throat and cropped short, green-gray eyes and a shy smile. Being without him was almost like living in a world without color: but if you’d never known it, how could you be expected to miss it?
We do not serve one another by obeying temptation — I know that better now. I see him in everyone and everyone in him; summer still steals the breath from my lungs after all this time. I was so sorry that he ended up being one of “those”, warm and promising as his infrequent smiles, but ultimately just as empty as he claimed me to be. So instead I am writing this letter, one that I will never put in the mail, never address, never seal in an envelope. I can’t say that I don’t know why we hurt the people we want the most. I know it’s because I wanted him to reach for me.
One confession: I still don’t know what love is. I know that it’s one step below obsession and one above compassion, sideways of affection and in between want and infatuation. I hear that it’s supposed to be perfect and selfless, but the extent of my knowledge begins to fade to black when I think about all the times I could have done better.
So I might not know what love is — but I do think I know what it’s not.