ARRIVING WITH SUMMER

In the summer, I keep losing track of time. The days stretch on and on, yet somehow fly by. The cat becomes nocturnal. Mosquitos nip at bare legs. The river calls. I drink the sun into my marrow so when winter’s solitude embraces me again, I will know in my bones that all this time I have never been alone. All this time is a trickster because I have known all along that I know nothing for certain except for this nature. Yet, it is this very belonging to the world that I have a bad habit of forgetting. A forgetting so fractal that this life seems but a clumsy remembering of the way back home. I rest my hands in the pockets of what I know to be true from every angle, which is to say I rest my hands in the back eddies of a nearby stream. I let the gentle current wash all else out to sea. What I know to be true is light on living water. The way that sometimes, nature holds me just like lupine leaves cradle the morning dew. 

Tonight, another gold dusk pulls me into a silken embrace, laying cool arms over sun-saturated shoulders. In this moment, all I know for certain is how twilight touching an indigo sea makes me feel. I watch the last rays dance a farewell on water’s skin until I find myself laid out beneath the stars. It doesn’t take long to become lost in the body of the universe. How it breathes all this into being in ways I will never fully understand, yet I know I belong to these ways entirely. Lately, becoming lost in nature sure feels a lot like finding myself. Like the carrion birds, I keep circling; back to the feeling that all my heart seeks is within reach. That the tidal ache of longing arises from the forsaking of a ceaseless unity. It is here, on the shores of belonging that summer unravels into the timeless moment. The season coaxes the spirit of everything to full bloom. How it ripens all of this ready. How it dreams us all immortal. 

As a kid, a summer night like this would often beckon me to the rooftop. With long limbs and little fear, I’d scramble up rough cedar siding, pressing my belly into the gutters as I’d pull myself onto the roof. Moss-speckled shingles would grip the skin of my bare palms and feet with a visceral sureness. I’d lean with my back against the porous bricks of a dormant chimney and drink in the black sky. I didn’t need to know why things always made more sense underneath all those galaxies, I just knew they did. Even then, it troubled me greatly - the idea of ever leaving this body believing the smallest of moments mattered less than any other. On the roof, I would wonder, and I would whisper my worries into a bottomless sky. Unsteady beneath the weight of a foreign future, I would often ask the night where it was I was headed. 

“Look up.” I’d say to that kid, if I could. And with countless celestial bodies smiling down at their moonlit face, maybe they would realize the good company they were in. Now here, on this summer night, I look up. I smile back at the galaxies. I cast my question out to the sky like a stone into the sea; it hangs suspended for a time in the thick of all that space. “Have you not already arrived?” The ghost of a star lazily queries back to me. Those soundless words echo backwards and forwards, transcending time to reach into and through the thumping chest of everyone I have ever been. And from somewhere far over the horizon, the undying sun laughs, and laughs, and laughs. I laugh, too. I think of what the wise have come to say again, and again, and again. They say, there is but one way to fold time back upon itself to step through the window to eternity. They say, the way of presence is always within reach.

In the summer, I lay beneath an August sky to watch the Perseids meteors stream by. Tonight, I can still hear her laughing beside me, though for a few cycles of the seasons now she has been somewhere up there - in the good company of stars. I think maybe I am starting to understand death as much more than an ending. When a meteoroid pierces through my home planet’s atmosphere, it is vaporized by the heat of its own friction against the earth’s gravitational force. They call this a shooting star. I think I know what it’s like to transform so wholly in an instant. I think I know what it’s like to be wished upon. I don’t know why laying out under all of this thick, black space feels like medicine for the homesick. I just know that this is where I find myself. Come summer, the season sings me to circle overhead; a familiar song calling me to arrive home again.