summer

     I believe it to have been the summer of two-thousand and twenty three that I look upon so fondly, so fondly perhaps it would find itself in usurpation in my memory of one of the most pleasant periods of my life. A period of muggy summer air, where the sweat that trickles down your brow was sweet and the worries that brew now upon your conscious were seemingly impossible to reach — a period of eternal nostalgia, of rakish reveling, of excitatory romping-abouts, a period wherein all dialogue you may recall is as poetic in retrospect as the speeches of time’s greatest orators. I recall the neon light of the concrete jungle’s night reflecting off of the lenses perched upon my nose, the feeling of my hair pressed against my sweaty forehead by my newsboy cap. I can bring to my tongue the echoes of every which meal I ate, to my hand every which scrape of the pavement in the metro, to my lungs every which breath fluttered upon the anticipation of the summer’s next revel, and to my mind every which memory that encapsulates each of the previously entailed. May it be only that it is looked upon fondly due to the roses that tinted my glasses, but it was a summer spent in the city of roses nonetheless. One could attribute my elation to my newfound identity as a lesbian, to the excitement of escaping Newberg, or perhaps even the stability of the time on a country-wide scale, but I find myself much preferring to attribute it to a quality of life at the time; the life you had as a teen, the last time you could get away with the trouble only a teenager could, that summer, your summer of fences jumped and coarse emotional education.