You always loved summer and I never did. I loved winter, the arboreal chill and flakes of snow like sugar melting in your dark hair, my breath like smoke in the air. You never understood. You always asked, “Did something happen, to make you hate the heat?” It was never the heat but everything that accompanies it: the pull of bodies towards one another at night, the peeling of sunburned skin like dragonfly wings on thin bare shoulders and the cough of car exhaust down roads dusted with jasmine and perennials. Summer was like a story I wanted so badly to tell but couldn’t quite remember.
I drift down these memories like rungs on a ladder. One skip and I’ll fall. I worry that I’m losing them, that if they cease to exist then it means you never did. By now you’ve vanished almost entirely, and I can’t remember your voice but I can, almost, remember your laugh - it tickles my memory with the agonizing brutality of anything one can’t quite recall.
I collect songs that I know you would have loved. The first time I heard ‘Chinese Satellite’ I nearly had to pull off the road; it was the line that went ‘But you know I’d stand on the corner/Embarrassed with a picket sign/If it meant/I’d see you when I die.’ It hits you like this, in waves - years gone, lifetimes spent, and you’re still in the same place, because grief doesn’t walk a straight line. These paths recede upon themselves, again and again, and in the moments I’m closest to you they cut painlessly like the incision of the sharpest knife. You’ve become adrift, though, someone I write about instead of someone I know.
Now I read books about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, sisters and brothers. Family. And then I acknowledge that as much as I read, and as much as I write, nothing will tip back the scales, restore me to blamelessness. This is the albatross around my neck - a very beautiful phrase for a very hideous thing.
So I try and fit your memories into my head and your kindness into my hands and your words into my mouth. It’s not always easy, especially the last; I’ve always liked to try to make hideous things beautiful and you always thought it was so strangely sad. But still, I drove through the Michigan summer towns last month and felt like you were there. I think that time moves more slowly in smaller places. Those little northern villages all seem like snapshots from a dying world: black tire swings by the water, arrow-winged birds swooping over currents of power lines and the sort of houses that look as if they’ve always been empty. Sometimes twin hawks wheel through the settling sky and it’s almost like catching sight of some beautiful vacationer flashing by in a car, hair streaming and face set vividly in profile — the sudden bolt to your heart, the knowledge that you will never have what was never meant to be yours.
I’m bad with faces and worse with names, but I could drive those roads in my sleep. Destinations are more familiar to me than people. The paths are inevitable, like those you walk in a dream; somehow, I always end up where I need to be.
So no, summer was never my season, but it was yours, and that means more to me than I could ever say. My dreams of you are no longer nightmares of loss. Coasting through the midday heat, the beach to my right and the dusky forest to my left, I thought that I could almost breathe again. It was the feeling of returning, not to one’s home but to oneself. I’ll never love it, but I see why you did, and somehow that’s enough.