Dear Summer,
When I stepped off the plane and fell into your arms, I already hated you.
You ripped away the cool Georgia mornings and blue skies over redbrick roofs. You stole the dinner conversations about last wishes and theories of time. You sent me across the ocean, back to the place where I lived before I knew that love was infinite and time accelerated until it imploded.
I tried to reach through your dizzy heat waves, but my arms were too short to hold hands across the Atlantic, and my words lost meaning when filtered through time zones and sunsets. Then the words tapered out and I decided to keep them inside of me where your light wouldn’t burn them, safe in the dark.
I’ve always seen you as a time of transition, a layover between New York and Madrid. A time to let the colors blend together but not a time to move forward. You are static, and I hate that any moment of such a finite lifespan has to be static.
When you come every year, I look inward and examine my dreams with scales and measuring tape, flesh them out into stories, print them and shred them and start all over again. When you’re here, I have all the time in the world and simultaneously no time at all.