With summer having truly arrived, our air conditioning broke, reliably, and so I’ve been taking freezing cold showers and then getting into bed sopping wet with the three fans blasting in order to fall asleep. It’s made for some pretty interesting dreams, although it’s terribly un-restful overall.

Wednesday, we went fruit picking at Larriland Farm. Took us most of the morning to pick through several blueberry bushes in the middle of the property. We filled white plastic bags with the fruit, gorging ourselves on the berries as we went. At the end, we drove by the red raspberry bushes, planted in rows and held together with wire, but because these berries were pricey, we only stayed for about half an hour. And they weren’t as fun, either, since the plants have thorns close to where the fruit is.

It was oddly satisfying, though, picking about seven pounds of fruit and taking it home. Much more satisfying than simply purchasing some at the grocery store.

Today my stepsister got into a small argument with my stepmother over a boy. While I don’t know the entire story, the gist of it is that my sister likes this older boy (she is 14, and he is 18). The boy has a girlfriend who lives in Canada. And so, this is a story of teenage love and blah blah blah. She seems entirely infatuated with him, while he continues to hold onto his guaranteed girlfriend in another country.

I heard my sister’s phone ring, heard her pick it up and answer. I was making a ham sandwich in the kitchen. She came in blustery and high asking if she could go over to this boy’s house to play some board game. When questioned about who else was in attendance, she named four other boys. When my stepmother (rightly, I must say) said certainly not, but that the boy could come over here to play games, my sister sputtered and argued.

This went on for some time (the greater span of forty minutes or so), while I puttered in the kitchen trying not to exist, and even when I sat down at the same table where my stepmom was eating. There I really tried to be invisible, especially at the point where my sister tried to elicit my help in defending her point.

I opted to stay out of it, and then removed myself from the table to eat my sandwich in my room, in peace. I heard many more things come from downstairs, including some name-calling, stomping, and sighs of frustration, but my stepmother won, apparently.

Personally, I was glad my sister was not allowed to go (although how she would hate me if I told this to her). And in my opinion the boy she fancies sounds like a very stupid one (or typical, if you think about it), who simply wants to use her. But I won’t insult him anymore since he’s not here to defend himself.

I also wanted to shake her and tell her how lucky she is to even have a mother who cares. What I wouldn’t have given, I’d like to say, to have a parent actually set boundaries for me. To have told me to stop being stupid about boys, about decisions. To have a little guidance.

Mostly, I think my mother was too drunk to notice when I’d taken an interest in boys. I doubt she knows about C. And I am positive that even when she knew about E, she was too busy figuring out ways to win back my father to bother giving me advice on anything else. So I’ll never know what it was she would have had to say about men, and dating. A pity, since it would have revealed a lot, now that I think about it.

I just ruined Harry Potter 7 for myself, while browsing innocently through the internet.

I am shaking, literally. I guess I’m more invested in the series than I thought.

I don’t know how I let this happen to myself. I’m going to go cry now.

Today I am incensed. It didn’t start until I pulled up to my work around 7:30, a full half hour early. The familiar Hyundai was parked in front of the pillar, and my heart sank. Instead of bounding inside, opening, then bouncing down to get some chai, I walked slowly to the grocery store, picked up some food for lunch, and half-heartedly ordered a smaller size of my tea.

I guess I should have been happy that my manager was there, since there was another large shortage last night, but I wasn’t. I mean, I was glad she took care of it for me. All I did was finish the opening paperwork, triple-count the money, and begin wandering around looking for something to do.

She’d reserved all the other projects for the other associates, however, and so I realized that my day was sinking quickly into tedium. This enraged me; I felt a little put out that there was nothing really assigned to me to do, forgotten. I let myself stew for a while and quietly put away cards. The rest of the afternoon slipped by in this fashion as well, and I was more than glad to leave around three o’clock, an hour earlier than I would normally duck out.

Not even the beautiful afternoon saved me from feeling melancholy. I wonder sometimes if there is something really wrong. When I can’t slip out of the mood no matter what I do, who I talk to, or where I go, it starts compounding itself. I go through this stupid cycle of feeling angry with myself that I haven’t put things aside, then guilty for lying in bed trying not to feel anything, and then angry again for pushing away my feelings in effort to be something else. It’s not right.

Tonight just made it a little worse; after an obnoxious phone call (one thing I can’t stand is talking to the Boy on the phone when he’s tired… because it becomes an excuse not to listen or make much effort in terms of conversation. This makes me irate, because when communication is so key to making us work, any lax effort really ruins any progress we’ve made…), I stomped down to dinner, where my father stepped the wrong way and made fun of me. It was an innocent comment, his way of being friendly, but it had the opposite effect of what was intended. I clenched my jaw, ploughed mechanically through my dinner and then bounded up the stairs when I heard my phone ring again.

Afterwards, I tried to write a little, but nothing came. I tried to distract myself with music but nothing sounded good. Only when my step sister suggested I come out for a walk with our dog did I feel any flicker of optimism again; we started out behind the yards of our neighbors’ houses, then cut downhill through the woods in an attempt to find the dirt path to Lake Frank. We were winding through a mess of tall weeds when we came into a place where the ground was padded with short, soft ferns, the straight, thin trees punctuating the green. Golden evening light shone down through the foliage, making our pause while the dog sniffed a log seem surreal. I felt better, after this, alive.

I also caught a small frog. For a minute, I forgot that I am in my twenties. When I saw the small brown spot leap across the path in a desperate zig-zag to move out of the way of four blundering people and a slobbering dog, I giggled, chased it down, clapping my hands around in the dirt until I’d caught it. I tried to show everyone without opening my hand too wide in case the frog, who was the size of a quarter, tried to jump out. Nobody cares, my sarcastic younger brother muttered, but I felt happy for just a moment. Young. Free.

Over the last few hours of the day, my mood slipped deeper into a slow depression. I started to think about the people that are leaving, about how much they mean to me (and perhaps that they don’t know it), and by the time my evening actually started, as I was bounding down the steps to answer the door, I was melancholy.

I tried not to speak about it, but it was inevitable in conversation. Some part of me feels ridiculous for being so final about everything–after all, it is not as any of my friends have said they are leaving forever–but the other part of me feels justified, seeing as how cloudy my own future has just recently become clearer.

We saw a movie and made small talk, but the conversation always returned to one subject. He’d said to me, we’ll talk and we’ll write; don’t worry. But I do worry. I balk at my own negligence at writing letters to people, at responding to e-mail like I say I will, and so I did not believe him.

“For some reason it feels like the end of an era,” I said to him as he leftmy house. And we had discussed it in the car. It is different, he’d said, because I’ve always known where to find you; In September, I guess I won’t.

I told him, “I just hate that it feels my support network is breaking up.” Or spreading out. Or stretched impossibly thin.

He still has that haunted look. Chestnut sideburns creep down into the hollows of his cheeks, and I have never seen his jawline so strong, the cleft still prominent and darker still with the five o’clock shadow on the lower half of his face.

He says he’s gotten muscular, but I always forget that he means muscular for him, not in regards to anyone else. So I see the same skinny boy I have grown up with. Well, with a small rut under his ribcage where the abdominals descend, a small line of definition up his biceps. I forget that he will never develop muscle like the rest of us can, just like I forgot when we were younger that he would never play with the other kids, never lift heavy things like his brother, and never run as fast as I could.

And after years of silence on both our ends–silence punctuated rarely with a missed phone call, a blinking window on the computer–he still calls me his best friend forever. We still whisper I love you, and take care before hanging up the phone. And I wonder how much it still means after all this time, or if they’re just words spoken into the wind. I would love to tell him I think about him every day, but what would that change?

This summer is like this so far:

Nights spent in front of my computer, poring over code until my eyes hurt, trying to will understanding from the unfamiliar commands on screen. I feel lost in a sea of text, and without the proper lexicon to express my confusion to others.

Afternoons spent soaking in chlorine, spinning back and forth to Holst’s The Planets as I swim as far as I can. My legs burn, my shoulders burn. I am getting better, I think, as my lungs no longer burn like they used to.

Nights spent clinging to the last tatters of friendships before we are split up. It’s school again, and our jobs that keep pulling us away from comfortable routines. Gone are the weekends where we lounged in one person’s apartment, where we stayed up until the sun rose.

Long drives back and forth across counties. I drive the same route every other day, the long and dark roads at night, back from work. I pass small houses, a sod farm, a cemetery, abandoned cars. I often ask myself why I both driving so far, but part of me can’t let go of the town I grew up in.

Evenings spent dancing. And drinking. Going out to seedy bars and spending what little money we have.

Long days spent reading. I finish more books than I was able to read all year in college. It is somewhat of a guilty pleasure. I feel uneasy wasting my summer away living in my head, where the characters only exist when I read them, where the grandiose events of their lives mean nothing to friends who aren’t reading about them too. Is it so terrible to do as little as possible in the time I have left here? I tell myself that it is not; this is my vacation from responsibility, which I’ll have no lack of this coming fall. I tell myself these things to ward off the negative voice in my mind that calls me lazy, unmotivated. Slovenly. A waste.

But the rest of me thinks, it is summer. Enjoy it while it lasts.

After finishing Episode III, I had wanted to watch IV, V, and VI all together (like when several friends and I watched all three of the LOTR extended edition movies in a single day), but the Boy stopped me. I then remembered how that one day sitting in front of the television for 12 hours ruined LOTR for me, so much so that it took a year and a half for me to want to watch it again.

But I must say, I love Star Wars. I really, really do.

Friday night was terrible, but mostly because of work and the headache that crept up on me beginning around 5:00 PM. I felt it start deep in my head just below my sinuses, and sure enough, it gradually moved closer and closer until it felt like my eyes were going to burst out of my head. I felt like gagging, like sleeping, and like passing out in the back room. And all of these feelings were made worse by the $9,000,000 shortage the computers reported. I spent the rest of the evening until we closed at nine trying to work out what could possibly have happened. And when I did finish, I was exhausted and shaking from all the painkillers I had taken and the frustration.

The night was not much better. It just had a strangeness to it that unsettled me deeply, I think. As I tried to park in the lot adjacent to the small house that the Boy and I were squatting in for the night, I saw the school police slowly patrolling the lot. I swerved my car back onto the main loop of campus, making it look like I had just taken a wrong turn, and then ended up parking in a lot that is separated from the house by a wide dune.

It did not seem so formidable while I stood next to it, but I began to wade through it. In the dark of night, with the lightning in the distance lighting up the city and the tall grass beginning to grow deeper, so deep that it came up just past my waist, I felt small, alone, and out of place. I felt like a trespasser at my own school.
Finally, I arrived. Found the Boy sitting at the table looking out over the field and the sky. Felt around in the dark for each other, and ended up much later sleeping underneath a loud, industrial fan. While he fell into a rapid and deep sleep, I lay awake for a long time. A phone call from another friend stole the only bit of sleep I got that night. I stared at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of the house around me until the sky began to light up again.

The lack of sleep made the trip to the beach seem endless and grueling, but once there I was able to relax some and fall back into myself a bit. We met up with a friend and three other people, waded in the water, tossed around a ball, and then spent far too much money at the arcade playing Time Crisis III. It was just a pleasant and restful day, full of people and waves. Sun. Crisp wind that cooled the afternoon heat. Lemon Italian ice, Silent Scope, bottles of warm water, a smiley face made from sunblock on the friend’s back, and the Boy. There were naps on the beach, inane conversations, and later, as the sun set, crabs and fried clams.

Despite the tiredness from the day, I went home feeling peaceful.
This morning was much the same, a quiet end to the weekend. Enticed into going to church, I was surprised to see my old Sunday School teacher there, who approached me and asked what I wanted him to say when he introduced the graduates when we got up. I have to get up? I whined, being wholly unprepared to stand in front of the congregation looking silly just for graduating. He laughed. I’ll think of something to say about you, he told me.

T joined me, wearing a pink shirt (which I disapproved of). When the service started, I was not altogether surprised to feel annoyance at the new minister, who is not as strong a speaker as the old one. In fact, I felt that many things had changed since I left, when really it was just small things about the service. It was enough, however, to make the sanctuary feel a tad alien, like an old home rendered nearly unfamiliar by renovations. They changed some of the stock songs we used to sing every service.

I suppose the most disturbing change of all has been me. I haven’t been to church in ages because of work, school, and the simple fact that I’ve lacked much desire to be part of that community. Having suffered somewhat from a crisis of faith, I have not felt compelled to speak to a god for a long time. I suppose this has left me feeling quite alone at times, but I also know right now that I am not ready or willing to entertain any kind of beliefs in a higher power at the moment. Maybe I’m even moving towards Eastern philosophies. Maybe I’ll never get back to religion. Who knows?

But I smiled through the ceremony and the pomp and sang with everybody else, went through all the appropriate motions. Maybe attending today helped a little with my faith, with not feeling so alone. But then I rebuked myself for feeling suddenly righteous and faithful. After all, I felt guilty feeling that going this one day somehow makes up for all the days I don’t believe.

I spent the rest of the day relaxing. Swam. Watched a movie. Went out for a bite to eat and a drink with T. Our conversation was long, fruitful, and made me feel mature, like I’ve actually grown somewhere. It’s a feeling I could get used to.

When I’m driving back home late at night, down the narrow and winding roads that connect Burtonsville to Rockville, I always think of things to write about, topics to probe in my journals. For some reason the long and familiar dark roads inspire thought. Sometimes, when I grow tired of singing along to the radio or talking on my phone, I’ll talk through these ideas out loud. I’m far more eloquent by myself than in front of people (aren’t we all?).

And then when I get home and sit down to write, they’re all gone. The thoughts, the notions. Like dream, everything I had been thinking about evaporates as I swing my legs out of the car and heave my things upstairs. All I am left with is the knowledge that I had an idea, and the comfort of knowing that I’ll be driving down that same road again, thinking, very soon.