SUMMER

I haven’t spoken with him in nearly a month. Now it is the first week of July, sultry, hot weather that lets you drown in moments, stepping outside, sucking down a lungful of sweltering, heavy air.

The telephone bells go off suddenly, breaking the air. I can almost see the sound waves as illustrated in those high-school movies on acoustics, red, curving bands that bounce off other objects.

They are red in my mind because I know who is finally on the phone.

Hey! he says happily. I wish I could make my voice do that too.

Hello.

You sound down.

Don’t I know it. So slowly, I try to speak without letting him know everything, because I know that if my voice cracks once, my head cracks open and the whole world will rush in and obliterate me.

I went running earlier, I’m terribly tired. So easily the lie slides out of my mouth like oil, tasting bitter but slick nonetheless.

What would you say to going camping again? Four or five days, maybe? I’m free all this week.

Head throbbing.

Well?

How badly I want to slam the phone down…how badly…

You still there?

Of course! I answer brightly. Sorry, I was looking at my calendar. I’d love to go. How soon?

I can pick you up tomorrow around noon? That too soon?

Never!

All right then, I love you.

The noose tightens around my neck, constricting so quickly that I can hardly breathe and cannot swallow. I almost feel the prickling of the rough fibers, scratching, picking.

I love you too!

Bye, then.

Gratefully, I hang up the phone, thrilling to the air that I can breathe, shivering that I still can. But exhausted, I go to sleep.

He picks me up and again I sleep the entire way. He must think I’m narcoleptic, but the truth is I do not want to look at him for too long. I drag myself awake and help set up, start a fire, cook some form of dinner.

A stick somewhere cracks and the sound of footsteps.

We both whip our heads around to the main trail, but he just as quickly turns it back to the white-hot flames.

A man with a heavy backpack walking quickly and efficiently. Tall, slender, with hair bleached white-blond in a bowl cut. Dark eyes that look mournful and a face that looks somehow sullen. In my mind’s eye I see him as a swimmer, slicing through water, clean and efficient.

Guiltily, I turn back when the fire crackles. He is still stirring the canned chili, looking at me quizzically. When he’s looking at my face the only thing I can think about is why he chose to make chili when it must be eighty-five degrees out.

This is why I can’t do this, can’t let my heart and mind go springing off into aerial dreams and castles of frozen air. Because I love him.

Love is not jealous.

This time he turns into bed before I do, and I am left in front of the fire, baking in the smoke to keep mosquitoes and black flies off of me. I think about the hiker with the blond hair and sullen face.

I turn away from the fire because suddenly the light is too bright, flooding my face with the warmth of shame. The night is too dark, as deep of a black as the fire is bright. Ice rises crazily up and down my spine, even though I’m quite warm. I am seized with a sudden urge to leap up, dance, jump scream sigh sing an age-old tale of eager love, betrayal, sympathy sorrow loss. Somehow I want to go to him, wake him and shake him hard, tell him that I don’t love him when I actually do.

Don’t I?

Yes, I do.

I want to tell him about the color of the sullen man’s eyes, tell him about the hundred and one lies that I’ve told him, the lies that are also true in some frightening, unreal way. The silence crashes and begs my tongue to speak, begs my voice to bleed the truth.

But I douse the fire and return, out of breath, to the tent and thus, sleep.

I wake long after sunrise.

Gosh, how late did you stay up? he laughs. I force a wide grin and a laugh of my own.

Not too late. The fresh air, you know.

I omit the dreams I had.

So, what should we do today?

Eh, it doesn’t matter. I just like being here outside with you.

The lie almost chokes me as I think about it, but speaking them comes easier and easier, oily, slippery. I am growing to live the deception I’ve wrought.

Only it would not be such a deception if I…if I what? To tell him that I don’t love him would be to destroy him, and I cannot find it in my soul to do that. One flinching glance and he’d crumble…

Like a sand castle.

How do I know this? I don’t rightly know. It feels ingrained in me, like it’s been in me for centuries, waiting.

But that’s silly.

His voice shocks me back to reality.

How about going down to the lake?

That sounds fun.

Hey, and we could rent a canoe, maybe! That’d be fun!

Secretly, my throat tightens at the thought of being stuck with him on a canoe in a lake, and I don’t know why.

Cool!

I find I enjoy canoeing. It is peaceful, pulling the paddle in long strokes, creating tiny whirlpools where you lift it back out. The bow cuts through the water silently and I let my attention stray to the water’s edge, staring somehow hopefully at the hikers and the bikers and the happy families whose children are splashing, squealing in knee-deep water.

I want I want I want I want I want.

I can’t put a name nor a face on what I want.

I’m greedy. I want.

What do you say we stop for lunch soon?

I’m game for that, I guess.

Hey look, we can stop over that ways, see that little stretch?

Yeah, okay, I guess that’ll be fine.

The boat abruptly changes course towards a stretch of beach, pebbly, rocky, signposted for more trails. I hop out and struggle to haul the canoe onto the beach.

Lunch.

Sail back.

And again, back at the site, with a tent and a fire and it’s all the same.

Sigh.

He moves in closer to me on my blanket in front of the fire, holds my hand, kisses my neck. The rushing sense of excitement that once consumed my body does no longer and I feel vacant, empty, like I’ve left my body.

Maybe I have.

There is nothing in me

Still I stay, pretending to enjoy the heavy summer, feeling and smelling and tasting the lake, trees, smoky fires and baking dirt. Unvoiced words that hang in the air so heavily that they can almost be seen.

I don’t enjoy those quite so much.

But still it’s difficult to stay confused and worried in the summer. The green of the trees is sonorous, resonating, and the vibrancy of the sky, the colors so shocking that I am startled to believe that I am here.

Is something wrong? he asks gently.

I swallow hard. It has come to this. The sound of scraping steel grates through my mind, unbidden, and I don’t know why.

No, nothing’s wrong.

Are you very sure?

How do I tell him about everything my throat has ached for in the past few months? Few days? Few hours? About what I’ve thought about, the sullen-eyed hiker, the night I stared into the fire for so long, the sensation of leaving my body I experience whenever he touches me? How hard I feel I could love him if I did? If I wanted to?

I do want to. But I can’t hurt him, crush him, topple him over in the resulting wave I’d produce. I can’t do it. Can’t come close.

Are you listening to me? Hey, I want to know if something’s wrong! His voice is plaintive, he does want to know.

Uhh, well, yeah, something is wrong, I guess.

Yeah? What is it?

I stare back into the woods, darkness seeping through the trees, enveloping, warm.

I want to love you.

But…don’t you? His voice cracks and I definitely can’t go on, watching the lines over his eyebrows knit up and his mouth turn down.

In my tenth-grade English class we read Russel Baker.

“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it!”

It’s odd how things you learn come back to you through life.

Summer is like that.