Summer Weepies

Whatever happens is right

-R.M. Rilke

When first heard they were overjoyed and petrified. The doctors had said it was unlikely and so it seemed a shame to hold out for hope. And fear and ecstasy tend to combine in the most important moments. She started looking at color palettes to repaint their office. He bought a book of names on his way home from work. They noticed schools in the area, playgrounds and yellow buses, things invisible to them before.

On weekends they cleaned, in preparation for all the new things they would need. The space a new life requires.
When they came across the old polaroid camera they took turns taking each others picture, smiling posed with cradled arms.


And later when he was cleaning again alone, after he'd lost both the hope and the promise, he came across that picture gathering dust in a half-painted pink corner. A smiling younger self, arms wrapped tightly around nothing.

No one deserves anything

-A.G. Fathom

That girl who Nigel and I both lusted after showed up years later and it all started again. Frozen daiquiris and she crosses the floor looking sublime.  We were out celebrating a birth or a wedding or one of those events that one celebrates and can't remember the circumstances of in that blur of time called your twenties.  There she was.  She was older, slimmer, with accentuated curves and dyed hair, a silver necklace and a purple dress that begged you to touch her arm.  It's hard for us to trust people.  She engendered immediate openness in her.  We recognized her immediately.  We all caught up in less than 5 minutes.
   "I have a big fat empathy for everything right now except myself.  I hate my life." She said.  "I hate my job and I hate all these relationships that I keep rebounding into and I hate having to depend on people but I hate being alone can you bum me a cigarette."
   I was smoking these really loud cigarettes at the time and Nigel was still smoking menthol cloves because he knew they ticked me off.  He gave her one first and we moved the conversation outside.  Nigel was bored.  She was talking about how she has belief but no religion, couldn't finish going to school and was living with this guy in his place because he was a good lay with a big dick and he paid for whatever she wanted but he was boring and she wanted more and wanted out.  Nigel got that look in his eye like he wanted to walk down the street and kick the shit out of somebody and punch holes in each and every brick wall along the way. 
      "I'm worried about my health and these pills I'm on feel like something desperate that's going to backfire ---"
      "Why don't you change?"  I asked, suddenly fed up with the complaining.  She gave me a shocked glare.  Nigel stopped punching his fist and looked up as if he'd been hit with a strong uppercut.  "If you're not happy then change it.  Stop taking the pills.  Move out.  Go back to school.  Get a job you love.  Jesus."
   "Yeah, I know, but..." and I tuned the rest out.  She wrote off her little excuses that justify her fucked up life and I finished my cigarette and made my apologies to go.
     "Oh.  Wow!  It was really great seeing you two.  I remember that summer with you guys so well.  It was such a happy time.  Such a happy time."
    "Yeah," said Nigel.  He had stopped listening too, some young thing was twisting to the music back inside.
    "See ya," I said.

if you do not come too close,

On a summer midnight, you can hear the music

-T.S. Eliot

I can't write in the summertime.  Something about July and the heat melts my words into puddles of butter.
The lower-depth analogies.  The bright and reaching metaphors.  The humorous and brilliant poetries.  It's all gone.

It's hard to love a man in a mask.  Especially when that man rates his days on productivity and the best he's been able to do on a Summer such as this is shit.

"I can't write for shit in this heat," I say.
"It'll be okay." She says, "everything will be alright."

She's right of course.  But I don't want it to be all right.  I want it to be all right.  Present tense.
Here's a poem.

I hate how you are upbeat
I hate how you laugh at my sarcastic jokes
Know when I agree I am disagreeing, and when I say no with sarcasm
It means yes.
But what I hate most of all
Is how much I like you
when I don't want to.