sommar
betting on a revelatory hiatus, peeing in the plane bathroom, oblivion in the hot asphalt
I stand in line for the plane bathroom, watching a tiny strand of my hair fly languidly into the hallway air, landing on the back of a guy sleeping with his head propped against the minitable. It is the third plane i take within 10 days, carried by an environmental guilt similar in motion to my blonde dna finding shelter on the pretty boy’s upper back. This flight, taking off from amsterdam to barcelona, is slightly more spacious than my previous wizz air ones, and everyone is considerably hotter — conspiratorially so, almost.
It was not an impounding need to pee that urged me to make the narrow leap into the corridor, glance at people in our alienated timespace bubble and shed myself on them. I was rather conflicted and bordering on some form of ennui I contract every beginning of summer when I realise I’m still bored and things do not make much more sense at its arrival, at least not in the revelatory capacities i expected them to all year leading up to its sizzle. It’s a sort of re-echoing bang that hits you when a moment you purposely mark out as a parallel to your amiss timeline decides to adhere to the string rather than be its talisman. So I need to distract myself from the dismay, and i read and play the webkinz offline games on my ipad and, of course, pee. I make eye contact with all the hot spanish men that both scare me and lure me into their worlds in a demeanour so foreign, so tenuous.
Riding the train later in the evening, or later in the week, it dawns on me that every summer makes its entrance quite desolately, suggestive of a sudden ending. Not a crumbles-and-ashes sort of ending, but a neat, progressive veiling, a vaporous dishevelling. I spend many idle summers wrapping myself manifold, like a picnic, losing all momentum between the creases of my shelter. I wish I had been obliged, by volition or circumstance, to focus on settling and viewing my life systematically at its crucial points: to buy a nice shelving unit, get a cat, start collecting something, be of some avail in a world so contained and chowed down into small attentive home-cooked bites. Faultily, I cannot contrive my life — I resign to the awe, waiting for a glide of light to combust and ripple all established order, ground open and buildings slack, a change so artificial with a core belonging to the vapidness of the hot hiatus season.
In the month of june, days start thumbling and coalescing into beads of feverish lethargy. When july pulls around, by the time everything is pudding, my gaze averts the light into a pitch blackness, the kind of ultrablack of black holes, a den in the horizon. How i want to see and my eyes not to lose focus, to exclaim and be happy and content and loud in that anti-cerebral, giddy, present way, in the kind of way the collective understanding of summer exudes.
A recurrent inquiry to the self: what comes after contentment? All around it seems that reconciliation is alchemised in a smile so consummate, like a certain end, definite and defined. That’s how I was introduced to it, at least, wondering what joy would be like if I didn’t learn of its representation prior to feeling it myself. Everyone wants to die happy, and everyone reevaluates their life within this feeble concept’s recourse, a parameter so deceiving, in my perception. Happiness, in the way I understood it since forever, is not sustained, yet greedily clenched. Kept in one’s hands like ration while riddled by famine. I, too, want to be happy. And if that is the natural progression of events, to end after its depletion. If contentment and summer are a life’s coda, I want to disappear in their atemporal haze, a bypassed missile sopping itself up in a milky oblivion. And if that happens when a sun so strong makes the ghosts siddle out of the city’s asphalt, when I wear so little I’m closer to the core of everything, I would mind it even less.
