Summer is supposed to be a time of "outside", of rest and relaxation, the increased exposure to the sun scorching away whatever mental or physical malaise that you might have homegrown over the cold months (and perhaps I grow too many). But summer always fills me with an anxiety, and I'm brought to my desk to think of what monsters hide underneath this anxiety.
In the summer of 2021, the first on the cusp of the covid vaccination rollouts, parts of the Northeast coastline experienced an overwhelming wave of lantern flies. Lantern flies are an invasive species. When they settle on you, you can't shake them off that easily. You can feel them crawling on your skin. Even inside the glass windows of my sanctuary, they would assemble in groups to copulate. They are large enough to fill the palm of your hand, and unafraid to stare back at you. In these circumstances, my father wanted me to help him prune our roses in the garden. I was reduced to tears after ten minutes.
I had nightmares that summer of how lantern flies would crawl out of the acne on my face. This is a different manifestation of entomophobia than the summer of 1999, when Mumbai experienced a wave of migratory moths. They would carpet the ceiling, leaving only the radius of the ceiling fans untouched. I was 5 years old and a child who slept with her mouth open. One of them decided to crawl in and I woke up coughing and sputtering and vomiting a half-dead creature from my mouth. Lantern flies and moths are objectively not carriers of known pathogens, but mosquitoes and ticks also wait for the summer to thrive again.
When the human body dies, it goes cold, so we associate cold with death. When a whale beaches, it's insides are being boiled alive on the land. It dies in a fever of it's own making, a body morphology designed to withstand the arctic frying itself on a beach, experiencing a blinding white obliteration in its own light.
The appeal of summer is supposed to be the extended hours of sunshine. That the atmosphere which skews grey will finally bring radiance. But it also brings an unrelenting scorching. When it gets wickedly cold, you can always slap on another layer. You can wear every single thing in your closet in one day if you need to protect yourself from the cold. But there's only so many layers you can take off. There's a point at which the skin itself is a greenhouse, and every single organ in your body has to ask you to stay inside with the air conditioning, because to go outside alone would be a death trap. The only reason we like summer is because the academic calendar conditioned us to.
But perhaps summer always brings a form of death. The wild promise of summer is always the end of the school year, an excitement that I probably last experienced when I was eight. But over the years, at some point, the end of the school year implied a foreboding for what was to come next. There's no season other than summer which forces me to ask, what next, what next, what next. Summer is the midpoint of the Gregorian calendar, a real reckoning with what has been made of the promise of the New Year until now, and I fear (as I always do) that I have not done enough. Perhaps, as I get older, each summer reminds me of what has passed rather than what is to come.
Time seems to move in giant blobs in the summer, which is also why I hate it. Whereas in the cold months, there's no difference between 4PM and 11PM, which means you could essentially wind down whenever you feel like, the endless day of the Northern Hemisphere summer feels like time isn't moving. There's no difference between 12PM and 7PM, entire seasons of nothing have passed by that time. Longer nights make more sense to me because things germinate and grow in the dark. Restful periods happen in the dark. Longer days feel punishing because what takes so much light to happen? And as I write this sentence, I think maybe youth is what takes this much light to happen. The fact that I no longer enjoy the summer means that I no longer enjoy experiencing youth.
Maybe because summer is a season of doing nothing that it fills me with dread. I have to let the extreme heat burn away whatever's left so that a new start can come in the harvest season in the fall. This summer is supposed to be a good summer: my last summer being employed for the next two years and moving out into my own apartment in a new city. You'd think this is a time of jubilation. Instead, I'm surprised to find how reluctant I am to let the life I had go in order to make room for the life I wanted for the last four years.
It may come as no surprise that I loved this entry. I feel like you encapsulated my distaste for summer months (one I do not share with many of my peers) so so well. I’m sorry I won’t be in the truly incredible city that you’re about to call home when you get here but I have no doubt that marvelous things await you here.