Something I've been trying to figure out over the last little while is why I have such a Thing about summertime.
Because... I really do. I'm not quite sure exactly how to explain it, but summer makes a shape, or a set of symbols, or something happen inside my head, a very specific but also somehow formless mythology of hot weather and long days and temporary freedom. I bought a graphic novel a couple years ago called "This One Summer", mostly because of the title, and now inexplicably I'm in love with that phrase and any like it. That last summer. The summer of love. Summer without end. The first summer of the rest of our lives, which is the private internal name I had for my friends' and my first summer out of high school. Summertime, summertime, summertime, and I can't figure out why I'm like this.
It's not like I've had a lot of extremely memorable summers, or any single particularly spectacular one. My summer breaks have, for most of my life, consisted of get out of school > spend most of December and all of January doing absolutely nothing > get struck down with existential panic the night before school goes back > go back to school while the weather's still boiling, because our school year calendar is designed around the holidays rather than around nature or common sense. I've had a vaguely full-time job for the last two summers (three, counting the one we're currently at the threshold of), which means that of late the December/January stage of the above has turned into more of a balance between doing as little as possible and spending eight hours at a time making coffee very fast.
Or - alright, maybe I do know why I'm like this. The summer I was sixteen (see, there's another one of those lovely phrases!) was the last one before I got a job, and six weeks or so of it between Thanksgiving-ish and New Year were spent on a family holiday on the other side of the world, the part where it's not hot in December and January. It's cold as shit, and I don't know why that had the impact it did on me, but I was weirdly despondent, especially at the prospect of spending New Year's Eve in winter. As far as I was concerned, the changeover between one year and the next was meant to be hot and restless, barely four hours either way to sunlight, a proper blurring of the edges. I didn't know how to reconcile any of that with the reality of the opposite solstice.
Our flight home the next week got in very early in the morning, and I sat in my living room and watched the sun rise at five-thirty the way it's meant to in January and felt like things were - right, again, somehow.
So does that even come close to explaining it? I missed half a season three years ago and now I've got a goddamn complex about it. No, that can't be right. I had the thing about summertime long before that holiday, even if I didn't have the same awareness of it, and besides I think it gave me a thing about winter more than anything else.
Besides, I can barely explain the summertime thing outside of a too-short list of things that have been known to bring it on: late sunsets; certain Bastille songs; the way grass scratches your legs when they're bare; fireworks; sleeping without the covers; candlesmoke, sunburnt cheekbones, a very specific sort of unearned exhaustion. Trying to be specific about what, exactly, all those things make me feel is an exercise in pointlessness. All I can say is that it makes something big and shivery and right well up inside me. I don't think I've got seasonal affective disorder as such, but I'm sure as hell affected by the season.
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