For the Summer Days: Just Be Peachy

There’s a growing affinity inside me towards the warmer days. For the days when the sun is high in the sky, and it burns the skin gently. The air seems bright, with tints of blue, green, and yellow. Those are the days when I want to sit on the terrace drinking coffee for hours, contemplating life — the good part of life.

The warm days bring me a sense of creative urgency. They make me want to read five books at once, read the 48 newsletters I’m subscribed to, write a poem, paint a picture, press flowers, and cook a delicious meal.

But instead, I sit there, drinking my coffee, afraid of moving, afraid of the moment slipping away. Inaction is the best reaction. I learned that from Pessoa. To entertain this feeling and not act on it requires great effort, but to act on this feeling and not let it elude me is a monstrous task that is hard to take on, even on some of the best days.

So, I trap this feeling inside me, frame it, and hang it on the wall of my soul. I entertain it for so long that I’m unsure whether it’s happening in real life or just within me. To me, it makes no difference. In fact, having it exist only inside me is even more plausible. Dreaming about doing things gives me the same feeling as doing them.

I used to resent summers, the warm days. I used to be too afraid of the light and the social pressure of having to enjoy yourself. And then the expectation to brag about how much you’re enjoying yourself. And then to recount all the things you’ve done last summer and the one before that. As if there was a precise time frame in which joy should arrive and be felt.

So, I used to come up with small, acceptable excuses to justify my lack of affinity with summer: the heat is giving me a headache, there’s too much sweating involved, sandals are too uncomfortable to wear, I can’t bear the watermelon juice flowing down my arm. I wore black and pretended I didn’t care that the Sun is slowly turning my body into a melting ice cream cone. Melted materials are the easiest to mould. I needed moulding.

Nowadays, I imagine summers to be more like an Eric Rohmer movie. Lying in the sun with a good book and just enough drama to keep you entertained. In Rohmer, there’s always something uncanny mixed within the verdant valleys, something you can’t quite put your finger on. I see summer with an ambivalence sown into it. It’s real and ethereal, here but gone within seconds.

And summer is most real in its ephemerality, in the moments you only realise happened once they’re gone. Like the smell of freshly cut grass, the first few raindrops that come down slow and heavy before a thunderstorm. It’s those moments when the sky sings purple before the sunrise, sending the world off to its next busy day.

There are only so many times you can experience the season of light before the twilight of your life. And if you’re lucky, you’ll remember one or two, perhaps, or all of them blurred together. But you’ll surely remember what it’s like to wait for the light, to feel the warm breeze, to drink coffee on the terrace under the blue sky. I sure hope so.

This summer, I want the fleeting moments imprinted on my memory. I want to feel them with every fibre of my being. Perhaps, I’ll eat a watermelon slice or a ripe peach without being bothered by the texture of their juices on my skin. Perhaps, just being will be enough. Just existing, with my chin tilted up towards the sky, my eyes closed, dreaming, and maybe reading a bit more Pessoa.