It was the Summer I’d turned twenty and I was stifled by June. My plans had crumbled around me and a listlessness had creeped into their place. I told myself it was perfect, that my living alone in a new city would force me to learn to love a sense of loneliness. But I was twenty and stifled by June. Twenty and dreading July, August, and the rest.
I went back. Left my shaded spot beneath the old oak I lay beneath, some folk artist singing in my ears, and drifted to another June.
The sun would be golden through my thin red curtains, seeping through the slit and sending warm hues across the small space. Across him, his face and chest softened in sleep. The heat was too sultry for covers that year. I’d be bundled in his arms and the sun would drape over him, painting him in gold and oh it would be hard to leave. To leave the warmth of bed and this embrace. It would take me so long to rise and tiptoe to the shared showers, careful not to make any noise. I’d dress silently, pack my bag with books and poems and books of poems for the day and kiss him goodbye. I felt already like we’d always been this way. I’d work and work and work until my phone buzzed hours later as he left my room and wanted breakfast. We’d eat and get coffee and chat about everything and nothing as if we were old friends catching up, as if we didn’t do this every day. Everything was of interest, everything was exquisite.
There is a sense when things are new of such expanse stretched before you. Of a lifetime. For the first time I let those daydreams I’d lose myself within in girlhood be recalled, of meeting someone and falling so far in love I’d become senseless. Of a quiet, easy love, like waking up to the smell of breakfast on a Sunday, wrapped in arms and sunlight. I let myself listen to songs about falling in love and I would understand. Because I could feel the fall in my future.
The whole summer was sun-baked. It’s golden in my mind. Lying in a field, him under the tree and me where the shade met the sun, daring it to burn my pale skin. Catching each other’s eyes across library tables. Day trips to escape so there was no one else but us. Talking for hours and hours, greedy to know everything. Skin on skin and sweat on sweat in our stuffy student rooms. Dips in rivers covered in paint and smelling of sickly champagne. Dates on unsteady boats. And then, of course, it stopped. I returned home and he remained. Intimacy became hours with a phone to my ear, drifting to sleep to the sound of I miss you.
Love me like you did in June, I begged him once. He didn’t understand what I meant, we weren’t in love in June, that’s when we met. But I meant I wanted it to be new, to be easy, to be a sunny bed on a Sunday in his arms. I meant I wanted to be sun-baked. I also meant I wanted to love him like I did in June. When it wasn’t love at all. When it was a vast expanse of hope and excitement, and nothing could go wrong. When two hundred miles didn’t make me blink. I wanted to love him like I did in June because it was falling when I couldn’t see the bottom.
Charlotte Renahan
our dreamer