verano

So we stopped speaking in metaphors: stopped pretending to be these cryptic phantoms without roots or chains or pretty bindings to hold us, keep us. New songs by artists who are nostalgia in its purest form-- saudade, a word we cannot, will not translate and will repeat inside our chapsticked lips and polished, rearranged teeth until you feel the need to say it as well. We are manipulative beings. Beautiful, intelligent people who are really fools and really scared that the stage after transparency does not exist.

And so summer is nostalgia, too. Homesickness for a place that isn't home. Worse than anything. Worse than anything you know because it is highlighted each and every year. Amplified. I mean I'm not doing that workshop or attending that camp because I have to completely bask in, pity myself for these feelings. Right? You know. You do know. Someone asked me who I like and I responded that I'm in love with so many people: I can hardly keep track. Truly, it's getting out of hand. The boy with the jawline got expelled and moved back to Montreal; through the lovely grapevine I've learned that he's been arrested. God, I love him.

Summer is music? Summer is music. And Rail City rain. And I don't know what else because it always depresses the hell out of me. The happiest time of the year, they say, the most lively, spirited bunch of a mess of months-- and yet hindsight paints it with nothing but sad strokes. Sad. Underrated word. Sad, not medicated and not tragically doomed. Sort of, but we have so many connotations for so many things. That will be the death of us. But I'll never abandon it.

Summer's connotations: things end so they can begin. No? Maybe. Beirut and buttons and cotton dresses, dusty parks in Montreal and leather lace-up Oxfords on our tattooed feet.

I've decided I can't meet any of you because I don't want you to be real. So that's that.