Summer Heat

Its somewhere after 10pm and the temperature is still hovering in the eighties. The concrete absorbs most of it and makes it stick a while longer than normal in the city. People are out on their stoops, walking down the street in cotton skirts, tank tops and flip flops, the kind of weather that makes you want for a fabric that breathes.

Anyway, all the lights are off in my apartment because of my belief that light bulbs on hot nights make that room just that much warmer. Its probably not very true, but I feel in the warmth, darkness is the appropriate atmosphere anyway. So the lights are off but the fans are on- one in each room. And Im sitting in my window sill in as little clothing as possible drinking ice water and trying to catch as much of the slight breeze passing through as I can.

Something about warm summery evenings makes me both happy and sad simultaneously. Its a longing sadness and a strange contentment as if this is how hot nights are supposed to go. I sigh a lot on nights like this.

I think what it reminds me of is the lack of crickets and heat bugs in the city. Remembering them is what makes me content; noticing their absence is what makes me melancholy. Its funny the things you dont anticipate missing. Heat bugs, grass between your toes, people.

Thats not to say Im missing a whole slew of things or people in my life, or even to say that Im currently feeling the absence, but I think Im feeling the impending absence. I realize, as the summer goes on, that in the fall I will not be continuing school, that I will stay in this job and just exist within it. I may move on from where I live, in fact I will inevitably do so, but things are going to be different for me from here on out. For one Im losing my roommate, and secondly I feel like Im losing a friend, and I think that that change is spurring me to really look at where my life is currently at and who I currently am. In some ways Im intentionally making changes in my life so I can feel like Im going somewhere, in other ways I feel like Im dragging my feet. As if my future is pulling me, kicking and screaming towards it, and more importantly away from the past.

I think thats the thing of it though, right? You cant ever have something without its opposite: longing without contentment, heat without cold, the future without the past. I guess I just have to learn to adjust and keep moving.