34/100: Summer Still
some days.
It is summer by the coast; some days, they only serve ice cream in tubs for the way it slides, melting from cones more quickly than it’s possible to eat it, cream coagulating as it warms as blood might; others, the wind blows the sea inland, hard salt on my lips the day I collect wildflowers for end of term bouquets after plundering the garden too zealously for weeks; one evening, I teach him to pinch the heads from prawns, how to peel their legs just exactly so so that the rest of the shell comes easily away from the sweet flesh beneath, that he eats for the first time; the first time I did this, I aged 11 and in France and heard Nirvana that same day for the first time, those opening chords blared from a speaker on the beach, and if I was sleeping, I woke then; after, we go for cocktails in a pop up bar, a bagel shop by day, it could be Amsterdam again; two weeks to squeeze summer out of or into before it is away again; slowly, nights begin to length and cool, soon, August; I find windfall apples in the long grass; November deadlines are far away, I price flights to New York, half an eye on the calendar with a heart only here; try to avoid my research plan, stop counting the words, avoid the archivist’s questions. Nine days since I stood at the river, I miss the sound of the Thames, it laps in ways the sea breaking always on shingle does not, I stood at its edge the day after the election; no, I am wrong, it was the week after, yes, it was the week after, time bleeds, and when was the last time I stood still? Try to recall but if there was a time this year it was February and now it’s nearly time for the Mid-24 playlist to turn to Late-24; and still until that morning I had not stood at the river and listened to its gentle lapping with nothing other to do than to catch a train back to the coast where it is summer still.
(I don’t know what I’m doing at the moment. I think I’m trying to catch a sense of days. I think it’s a Larkin thing maybe, ‘What are days for? Days are where we live’. Wanting to capture impressions more than anything else, that feeling in summer where everything, even thought, runs away, bleeds a little at the edges, nothing coherent, sensation more than anything else.)