August 31, 2008

• The last days of summer

  About two weeks ago a classmate of mine, one of our newly appointed grad student liaisons (don't quite know what all the job description entails), started sending out emails reminding us about peer tutoring meetings, grad student receptions etc in the upcoming weeks. He ended his emails with "enjoy your last days of summer". The first time he did this I was bitter. I recoiled a bit, bristled. My summer was not over. It was not in the "last days", as though it was aging and sickly and in need of bed rest and weekly family visits. I was in denial.

  These are indeed the last days of summer though. The days are hauntingly beautiful, with cloudless skies and a preponderance of delicate flowers everywhere, as though the trees themselves sense the end and, with their last bursts of energy, attempt to fool the weather into thinking there could be another month of summer. Or maybe they could work out a deal where they skipped fall and winter and reinstated spring.

  Today is one such cloudless-sky-and-pretty-spring-like-flowers day. I know it is the last days of summer because there is a clashing of dimensions, a mixing of realities going on. The summer reality, the one where random anythings can, and have happened is still here, as is evidenced by the continuous random happenings of my life. But the other reality, the one that involves responsibility and logical thinking has begun to appear, shimmering in and out like the wizards in Harry Potter whose images can appear , shimmery and vague, in fire and talk normally as though they weren't in a ball of flame. Sorry. My summer reality allows to me to try to intelligently refer to the makings of the Harry Potter saga in a metaphor, though I should, in all likelihood, be embarrassed to admit to having even read of the boy wizard and liking it.

  I know it is the last days of summer because even as I sit in my mother's backyard in suburban New Jersey I can sense the changing of the sun, and I can sense the earth's slow rotational shifting away from the sun too, like the cooling off of a once very passionate and close relationship now reduced to sporadic phone calls and the occasional visit. And though it is still visible, still warming the trees at 6pm, the sun's light is already different. Soon there will be no sun past 5pm.

  The last days of summer have me in a similarly weird in-between place, more so than the normal in-between place that all twenty-somethings exist in. I am contemplating various things under this cloudless sky on a back porch, which isn't unusual. I am also sore and tired from too many nights festivities in close succession, living as a summer-reality person and not an otherwise-reality person. The truth of the matter is I am approaching a reality (perhaps permanently) that means I am too old to enjoy the summer-reality of much younger folks. As I sit here lamenting the ever present pain in my left knee, the soreness of my thighs from dancing in ways I should probably no longer dance in establishments I should, perhaps, no longer dance in, I feel the death of something, the loss of a way of being. And yet there is a bit of a lightness, a rejoicing at the thought of getting older, of doing away with the emotions that so ruled me as a teenage girl, including the irritating, and yet deliciousness of unwarranted jealousy (which I felt fleetingly last night in said establishment which I should, perhaps, no longer patronize). Then again, I suppose some emotions, some ways of being never age. And they never die.

  In any case, things are always as they should be. In relative chaos certainly, as my summer seems to sometimes have been, but as it draws to a close I know that the sometimes chaos is a part of the very ordered way of being, of growing, of living. And maybe I'm wrong about the realities, and the bits about aging and the inappropriateness of my summer revelry (as infrequent, except as of late, as it was). The last days of summer only gives way to the first days of fall, and that's an entirely different way of being, just as confusing and delightful and random as any other.

  Then again, I'm rambling now, as cloudless skies tend to make me do. And this summer reality may have resulted in a personal spilling of the brain that makes little sense at all in any reality.

  • 6:19 pm
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