time

Ahoy,

I wrote this essay thinger for my writing class. It's supposed to be a memoir type piece. And everybody else thought it was 'depressing' at the end. And I'm just sitting there giggling to myself because that was kind of what I wanted to achieve. They were all 'It ended abruptly and the reader is left wondering...' And that was kind of exactly what I wanted to achieve. So I don't know now if they think I'm a sad person or if I'm conceited and can't take criticism because I didn't really say I was going to change it. I had fun writing it, and I had fun making it different from everyone else's. It felt kind of rebellious.

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I think of this as my quarter life crisis. Frankly, I’m astonished and rather peeved that they never told me about it. Why don’t they ever tell us about this? I mean, they tell you about the mid-life crisis. They tell you about the crow’s feet that stop being exotic delicacies. They tell you about the exploding waistlines that become more permanent than Thanksgiving dinner aftermath. You see the balding middle-aged men driving fast convertibles. Aging happens, but, according to the grown-ups, not until later, right? Not until you’re a floppity-jillion years old, right? Wrong.

Aging, I discovered, happens at the end of high school, at the ripe age of eighteen. Okay, so botox and liposuction were not needed, but I aged. While everyone else was in a rush to get out of the hallowed halls of public high school, I was about to sign my death sentence. It was one of those sweltering Chicago days where all you want to do is stick your head in the freezer. Tom Skilling, local weather God, was warning everyone to stay inside. I had just procrastinated my college decision to the last possible day I had with which to decide. Our computer seat, covered in some sort of fake leathery material, was sticking to me and I couldn’t keep myself still enough to stay in front of the computer. But I knew my day of reckoning had come. Skin cancer and cataracts spelled impending doom on the horizon. Blinding sun and four month periods of never-ending drizzle were in my forecast. All through high school, I would repeat to myself and everyone else that I would never go to school in California. Never, ever in this or any other universe. I suppose it was a false proclamation. Moving the cursor to dangle over ‘yes,’ I closed my eyes as if to wince in pain. Electronic confirmations had no possibility of getting lost in the mail, I immediately realized. With the simple click of a button, I had sealed my fate for my next four years in Berkeley, California. Dread latched itself onto my heart like Wile E. Coyote to a branch on the side of a cliff. The rest of that summer, I spent avoiding Berkeley like the plague.

I lived that summer like there was no tomorrow. It would be safe to say that I regressed to my summers of yore. Though I now had territory that extended beyond our single city block, my summer came to resemble that of my four-year old cousin’s. There’s nothing like childhood in the summer. Now, when I say ‘summer’ – I mean ‘summer’ in its purest form. I mean that ‘school’s out for summer/ school’s out forever’ spirit. Playtime was happiness eternal, and the summers were all about playtime. Days were filled with sinking and swimming at the pool down the street and coming home pruney and stinking of chlorine. I loved it. Nights brought a refreshing batch of longan regards of my uncle that flip-flopped between career choices like a frog with lily pads. I knew all about the essence of summer that was captured in the sun-block I bathed in, the outside I brought home evidenced by the footprint shaped dirt stains on the kitchen tiles, the lightning bugs I made friends with. Summer used to be about unplanned afternoons at the beach building sandcastles and fairytales. Summer used to be about playing tennis for so epically long that my racket became an extension of my arm. Summer used to be about chasing the sun and laughing off the heat.

That summer would be my last. While I knew the end was waiting on the West coast, I bid farewell to my last carefree days, my last vacation without obligation, my last summer- gone by in no time. Bittersweet good-byes and tearful hugs met me at the end of my last summer. It was to be the epitome of summers – a summer to end all summers. Perhaps that was my mistake. Perhaps I had too much fun at once, as if I had used up my lifetime of summertime fun allotment all too quickly. I didn’t realize until years later, that I had lived my last summer. I hadn’t known it at the time, but my following summer would go down in the history books as the ‘summer of the missing summer,’ and the next would bring me too far from home. It seemed that summers like the ones of yore would never cross my path again. I hadn’t known it at the time, but I don’t think it would have been as magical as it was had I known that that summer would be my last.

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shockingly early,
JT