December 14, 2078
The Day The Words Came Back
I sit in my favorite rocking chair, watching television. It is the same chair my mother used to rock me in when I was a baby, actually, God rest her soul. Funny, isn’t it, what a complete circle this crazy little life is? From dust to dust, from diaper to diaper, from rocking chair to rocking chair?
I am an old man now, a geezer they call me, and I can’t do much more than this these days. The world is much the same as it always was, in case you were wondering, just with more humans and nicer cell phones. No flying cars, no magical laser beam machines to cure cancer and famine and heartbreak. A war is waging on this side of the Earth, a climate disaster is occurring over on the other. Children are fretting about their futures, and parents are fretting even more about their children’s futures. People often fear the future until they realize the future is now and they are living in it. As I wrote as a young man, time will come. That’s what it does. You can push against it, run from it, fight it like you fight the snooze button on a groggy morning, but it will run forward like it stole something. And most of the time you will be fine. As it says in the book of Ecclesiastes, “a generation goes and a generation comes, but the Earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hastening to its place it rises there again.” The Earth has remained, but the sun is preparing to set on me. And I am about to float on. I know just who I pray to see on the other side, if there is one at all. I will get to that subject in due time, of course. Time is all I have, after all. Until I don’t anymore.
The year is dying, the winter finally riding down on the chilly winds from the northeast. The trees that have leaves to lose are dropping them, and my little beach town is shutting down. This morning, however, the winds shifted to the south and a warm breeze started flowing, giving us one last glimpse of the season – an Indian Summer in the dead of winter. After I woke I went out on my balcony and watched people get out their surfboards and dust off their bicycles, greeting the sun, and after school let out, kids splashed through the tide pools for one last hurrah before the first nasty cold front drops in from the northwest this weekend. But I don’t need this temporary heat to get happy, because I carry a summer eternal within me. An invincible summer, if you will, tucked down deep in my soul for this old man to revisit whenever the memories scream from the shadows and my ghost world blacks me out. There is no Her to comfort me, even though I have halfway sensed her spirit whooshing past me on a windswept beach day, or sitting next to me in a quiet lonely morning in my kitchen, sharing a cup of coffee – but I like to pretend there is. So I kiss my papery fingertips and then touch her photo as I pass it, just as I have every day for years, and will continue to do until I return to dust. That’s the thing about people: they’re never really there when you need them the most.
I’ve got things to do today, big things, but I decide I want one last view before I start. This town, and this memory, deserves that much. So I claw my tablet off the counter and go out on my little porch where, as an eighty-eight-year-old, I spend my days looking down on the streets where I played and lived and bled and loved and become a man all those years ago. I see the olive green sea, the cracked sidewalks, the blocks and blocks of condominiums with palms jutting out here and there like gophers, and finally I see the new pier jutting out into it, and I go back. Back to when the gleaming condo towers were beach bungalows and the E-stations were charming little cafes and my wife was young and alive and beside me.
Back to the heartbreak that made me.
Back to the glory that devastated me.
Back, of course, to Summer.
As soon as I can, I slip out of the nursing home and hobble down to the pier with my tablet under my arm, my white hair shining in the silvery glow of the December sun. It was strange to watch my body age, slowly at first and then faster and faster, but by now I am completely beyond caring. I know I don’t have much time until the nurses find out I am missing, so I sit on a bench on the boardwalk to catch my breath. I look out at the sea and smile. I would adore to join the surfers battling the waves, young and strong as they maneuver their boards, or grab a pole and wait for a shark to bite, sit back and wait for the fight. But I can’t. Time has taken those activities from me, and I am now a prisoner in my own broken body, just like Summer was so many years before. But I can dream.
I watch a little toddler attempt to walk down on the sand, stumbling along, trying to figure out how to be a person, until it falls on its butt and laughs. What a beautiful relief, that this tumultuous and evergreen place is still spinning in blackness. I laugh at the baby, then – you do that when things come alive again.
I am eighty-eight now. I guess you could say I had a good life. A good, quiet life. I did nothing terrible and nothing heroic. As I got older I shed some of the anxieties and neuroses I’d gained from my ruinous childhood, and the advancing years taught me one of the single most valuable lessons I would ever learn: at the end of the day, nobody really gives a shit. They have all kinds of problems on their minds, and you are usually not one of them. A few months after Summer died I went to work for the Jacksonville newspaper and wrote there until it turned into a website, and then I wrote there until it turned into an iPad app, and then I wrote there until it went out of business and the parent company gave me a flimsy retirement package. In my darkest hours, the need to create propelled me forward, and all was good and happy. I married, of course, to a girl named Lily. We were happy together, I swear it. But we never really spoke of Summer – not until the end, at least. She knew, obviously, and once I walked in on her staring at Summer’s online obituary before she snapped the laptop shut and turned around with a false smile. But I think she understood that it was my story, and mine alone. And when the lung disease took her several years ago, I was broken. I loved her, I did, and I always will. But how do you tell your own wife that you are still on fire in love with another woman? My love for Lily was like the Kansas prairie, long and flat and unchanging, although vast in its own ways.
Summer was my Everest.
After Lily died, bless her soul, it wasn’t the simplest thing to let in the desires and the love I’d tried to hide my whole life. Even thinking of Summer made my face feel hot, like I was betraying two ghosts instead of just one. But soon I started opening up the hole her departure had left in me. When you are younger, with things to do and people to be around, it’s easy to run from your truths, to ignore your own reality. But suddenly a crushing quiet had descended on me, and with nothing else to do, the memories rushed in – and Summer arrived like a boomerang from my past. All my life I suppressed one simple fact: she was all of my love. That didn’t mean I couldn’t love again, and love more people. I thought starting a new fire meant extinguishing the old ones, but all I ever did was put myself out. Sometimes I would even write poems meant for Summer and then dedicate them to Lily instead, out of guilt. But soon I had to accept it: she was my twin soul. So I stopped hiding my feelings, stopped concealing who I was longing for. And soon I was like a young man again – engulfed in love. Once again, I was twenty-four, staring out at the sea at sunset, looking for Summer in the waves. And ever so slowly, I started rediscovering my truth.
I once wrote that the best kind of love, even if it ends, pushes out the edges of your heart, expands the dimensions of it and leaves space to let more in later. And I am happy to say that much love rushed in after Summer left. I had two sons and a daughter from Vietnam, and I filled their lives up with love. They had golden childhoods on the streets of Atlantic Beach, and they were happy. I never again spent a summer in Jax Beach. The ghosts were everywhere, and so I ran from them. But I was good and content in my new town. All of my children are happy and living in the Jacksonville area with their families. Most of the other people I knew are dead now. Time rose up like the tides and swept them away from me, and soon I will follow, too. Hank and Autumn spent one happy decade together before the breast cancer returned with a desperate vengeance and took her. Hank didn’t last long without her, finding a midnight trip off the pier more desirable than a life with no Autumn in it, and in the end they were buried side-by-side only steps from Summer. But that is okay, because some people were meant to set sail early. Life is measured sideways, not vertically. I bring three bouquets when I visit the cemetery now. And when I forget to buy flowers, I pick grass.
Kim from support group didn’t last very long, either, as she was unable to overcome the problems stemming from her Spina Bifida. But during her short life she was able to help dozens of sick children with the small foundation she started in Summer’s name. Everything Summer worked for continued. And I am proud to say that I was lucky enough to take Kim on her first date just a few months before she died of a bed infection at the age of twenty-six. I still keep the photo in my bedroom, actually. The waitresses at The Cheesecake Factory were even condescending enough to give her a stupid crown and a sash reading “CHEESECAKE QUEEN FOR THE DAY.” She wore them sweetly and without comment, as usual, and I never forgot her.
Our old house is no more, and is now an E-station where cars charge their batteries. Most of the other things Summer knew are gone now, too. The rows of ramshackle old beach houses in Atlantic Beach have been replaced by sleek condo towers, and the little tourist shops along First Street are now thumping nightclubs for young people. I miss those days so much. I miss the place the world used to be, and the people who used to be in it. The rundown, blown-out beauty of Jax Beach, the way the shopkeepers dusted off their porches every morning, the sleepy lifeguards who would wake early every morning to raise the American flag above their bulbous white station that looked like a big wedding cake, the eee-eee sound the cicadas made on the marsh every night. And oh, the people. Even my neighbors I’d never met that would wave to me as they walked their dogs at sunset. I miss all of them so much. I would not recommend aging to my worst enemy.
I go to Summer’s grave often. It is on a forested hill on the highest block of the barrier island that makes up Jacksonville Beach, and from some angles you can see the marsh. Some of the marsh has been swallowed up by the slowly rising seas, but most of it is still there. I ride the nursing home bus to the cemetery and then push my walker down the overgrown pathway and look down at her grave, which is now weathered and cracked, but still somehow standing. Never was there a sight more lonesome than a single grave. But still, I stand there and I smile and I think about how awful the world is and how senseless it is and how it’s also sort of beautiful, too, because a girl named Summer Johnson existed and was loved with the fire of a million August suns. That should count for something. I think it does.
Time can take many things, your health and freedom included, but it cannot take your memories. They’re all I have, really, and when I go to her grave I sit back and think about all the places I went and all the things I saw and all the people I loved. But mostly I just think of Summer. Because if you are lucky enough to have found a love like Summer, it will stay with you forever. A love like Summer remains. And you know, looking back all these years, I can completely understand how I sat beside a bed as a boy and watched my grandfather hold my grandmother’s hand until the very end, even when she was a vegetable and her body was readying to succumb to the relentless march of death. Because death is no match for love. Love can be lost, but never destroyed. Love always wins. It will remain.
Love will also keep a soul alive. Those we love live on in us. A person who was loved and left love behind cannot die so long as they are kept inside the beating heart of a human. Soon I will be gone, buried in the plot across from Summer that I bought sixty years ago, and all the memories I have and all the energy in me will cease to exist. So that’s why I came up with this nifty little plan to make her memory outlast me and make my little Summer truly immortal.
Fast forward to the old man I am now. To the dream – the hour I first believed. At first I thought I was dying. Her face at the end of my bed, getting to hold her again…I thought I’d passed on in the night, and had gone up to be with her again. But it was her, and I wasn’t dead, I was just dreaming. That’s when she told me that love will return. That’s what it does: boomerang back to you on the hot winds of fate. All you have to do is keep the faith and wait. The dream was…shattering, really. It made me miss her so much I wanted to die all over again. I can remember how she had prodded me along to write a book, to fulfill my dreams, and there she was, prodding me even in death. And all at once I knew how to make it up to her. Oh, I knew. I’ll do it even if it takes me fifty years, I’d promised Summer all those years ago, when she’d begged me to write a book. If only I knew how accurate that promise would turn out to be.
When you grow older, your heart dies. This was true back when I was a boy and it is true now. Your dreams start becoming buried under more pressing matters like exams and bills and mortgages and children and arthritis and before you know it you’ve let go of them completely, your soul collapsed, your dreams burned out like the embers of a campfire, and you become content with mediocrity. But reaching into myself and dusting off those dreams of writing a book has been the second greatest thrill of my life. I’ve found the fight in me again, all thanks to Summer’s inspiration. She was a second wind in the sails of an old man – her very last gift. And it is never too late to turn things around. Because you never get over the death of a person you love, and that is the best and worst thing you will ever learn. You will never be yourself again, but that also means you will be a totally new person – and what could be more motivating than that? What could be more propulsive than grief’s blank slate?
At first I thought I was crazy to even try to write the book. I could barely even finish a walk to the restroom without sitting down to catch my breath, how the hell did I think I was going to write an entire book before I died? But I fought on. Ernest Hemingway said to write one true thing and start from there, and that’s what I did. So I sat down and wrote the following sentence: I loved Summer Johnson. Because I did. And I do. And that fact has ruled my entire life, propelled every single thing I have ever done.
Even now, there are a million little moments I wish I could revisit and fix. I loved her as a boy, and I look back on that love as a man. People get so wrapped up in their own heads that they grow cold and unfeeling to the ones they love the most. Perhaps I could’ve made what I didn’t know were her last days even a tiny bit better by telling her how much I loved her or doting on her a bit more or lingering my hand on her cheek for a few more seconds. I guess that is the curse of a survivor; looking back on the mistakes you made and being completely unable to rectify them.
And it’s strange, because while I am fiercely protective of Summer and her memory, I also want everyone in the world to know about her. I want them to know what I knew and feel what I felt and grieve how I grieved. And I wanted them to know of her not as some broken, flawed, scarred girl, but as a wonderfully normal human who lived and breathed and was just like anyone else who did those things, except better. But I didn’t know how without feeling exploitative – until now. The years had dulled the anger and added some perspective, and I was finally ready. So I returned to Jacksonville Beach, to a new nursing home tower two blocks from the sea that overlooked the new pier, so full of strangers. I thought about them a lot, about their lives and their dreams and their fears and their secrets, and about how they would never know that a girl named Summer Martin Johnson existed. I wrote and wrote and wrote, omitting some details I only want us to know, that I want to go to our grave with us, and then added my own note at the end, of how I fought to come back alive after her death killed me inside. The result is the book I am sending to publishers today. It is my hope to finally give Summer a voice and make her life and her death worth something. After all these years, I would like to finally give the thoroughly unfinished story of Summer Martin Johnson an ending.
~
Life is a game of odds. I know that much by now. It is Scrabble on steroids. There is no order, symmetry, or destiny. Sometimes you win dazzlingly and sometimes you fail spectacularly. That’s just how it is. I learned all that from someone I loved a lot. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find order in the numbers; miracles in the odds; magic in the madness. Summer was the miracle I found in the random chaos of the world, a spirit in the dark. Most humans look to God for love and never feel anything in return. I didn’t need to find God – I found her walking the streets of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, in the summer of 2014. And it’s not like you can’t make your own rules in this game of nonsense, anyway. After all, I made my own, with Summer’s help, or whatever dream version of her that transferred all that knowledge to me, anyway. And lessons aren’t always the things you learned – they can be the things you wish you would’ve learned, too. Here are some of the lessons I put into the book: be not someone the world happens to, but someone who happens to the world. Trust yourself: at the end of the day, you are all you have. Find something that makes you glad to be alive and never let it go. Never let yourself stop feeling. Run to what scares you. Never miss a chance to look for beauty in the world. Always search for the good in people, because there are just as many good ones as there are bad ones. Do everything you can to leave love behind. Choose to hope. Do not let yourself be ruled by dogma, which living by how others think you should be living, but get out your own flag and fly it high. Have the courage to turn yourself into exactly the person you want to become. And when all else fails, when the odds are piling up against you like waves in a hurricane, keep fighting. In the end, the fight is all you will have left. That, and love. Always love.
And I am about to fight against those odds with this book. Soon, men and women in gleaming office towers in Manhattan will receive a book called The Summer Remains. Because Summer will remain forever. The “remains” of the summer I spent with her haunted me always, sure, but I am thankful for those ghosts. The best people are a little haunted – I learned that from a singer I liked a long time ago. (Saviour’s long dead, too. Overdosed on pills and heroin one year shy of joining the Twenty Seven Club, if you were wondering, and I know exactly why. She focused on the bad and forgot to look for the good. She stopped fighting the sharks, and her songs screamed it.) And this unoriginal old man will freely admit that the title of my book was stolen from an old song by Saviour that is so special, I feel strange even sharing it because it feels like I am betraying myself:
Ankles in the emerald waves
Hand in hand, hip to hip, trynna be brave
But what we can’t say, we both know
Our love won’t make it past this horror show
Looking for heaven under these palms, finding hell instead
Getting closer to the fire with every fight, every sip, every breath
Got lost in your glow, thought it was a halo
Turns out that elixir was poison, and those devils, they gotcha on the down low
Now we’re side by side as the day breaks, ‘bout to face the sun
Golden hair, golden skin, the golden ones
Angels headed straight to hell and we both know it, here in these waves
‘Least I got you beside me while we face the flames
But hold up, babe, take my hand
Diamonds, platinum, wedding bands
What we had, it’s gonna stay
Even though this world, it’s headed for the grave
The summer remains
Summer Johnson stood and faced the flames of the world beside me. I survived. She did not. But humans are crafty and resilient and I am still alive. (And I ended up finishing the book the day before her birthday. One last trick of fate, I suppose.)
With my decrepit old fingers creeping across the screen of my tablet, I create a new email and address it to some publishers I’d researched. Then I attacha favorite photo of Summer, a shot of her laughing on the beach under the pier, her smile glorious and brave and free for all time. Then I attach the book, along with my personal introductory letter explaining the project:
My name is Cooper Nichols, and this year marks the sixty-third anniversary of the death of the love of my life at age twenty-four. Time has dulled some of my memories, but when I see her in my dreams she still looks like this, frozen in her prime like an insect suspended in amber for the ages, with sun on her shoulders and sand under her feet and a breeze at her back, young and brave and free forever. And though she left us far too early, it is an injustice to human life to measure it solely by the years we spend on this Earth. I know that now. Years are one yardstick, but so are the souls we sink into, the smiles we create, the lives whose courses we alter. Time is relative but impact is not, and by that standard Summer fit a little eternity into the two decades she was allotted. She was the best person I ever knew, good and honest and true, and she changed me, along with countless others. Her life was so short on time, and yet so incalculably grand on impact. No one has ever been more grateful for twenty-four years.
If time is the ocean in this photo, then most footprints left on the sands of it are temporary, washed away soon after they are cast. But Summer’s strength and grace and resilience were the amber that set her footprints into stone. When most people depart this Earth they leave damage or heartbreak in their wake, or even worse, nothing at all. Summer left a road map. I followed those steps all my life, and now here they are in this book, mapped out for whoever is reading this. I hope they can help.
This is the story of Summer Martin Johnson and the eternal summer we spent together on the shores of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, sixty years ago. Words alone cannot do her justice, but love can try.
Feel free to email me with any further questions. Maybe I will be around to answer them. Maybe not.
Yours truly, Cooper Nash Nichols.
The book almost felt like it came to me as if from above – like lightning had struck from the gods and relayed the power of heaven through my nimble fingers. I have not been that clear-headed since the sudden burst I got while finishing my diaries after Summer’s death. The knowledge I wrote down did not even feel like it really came from me – it felt timeless, ageless somehow. Who knows – maybe the voices in my head were real people who lived and breathed and died, who didn’t see their stories told during their own lives, and had breathed it into my lungs and soul instead. Maybe they’d walked the sands of Jax Beach before me and left all their love behind, and I was simply the stonemason chosen to etch their story onto time. Who knew for sure? Whatever the case, the book is done, and my girl will now live forever. I kept my promise, as hard as it was. I stood in my truth, and this old man is so proud of himself. She gave me meaning, and I will never be able to thank her for it.
So that’s it. That’s my book. I have seen the conveyer belt of time change many things about this world, but humans never stopped reading, and there will always be a demand for beautiful words that come from the heart. Sure, authors may be making pennies on the dollar these days, but it’s not like I’ll need the money anyway. Maybe these publishing people will like the book and decide to publish it, and maybe they will not. God knows I probably won’t be around to see what happens, anyway. Death used to terrify me, but now I see it as an ocean of sleep, a vast expanse of peaceful nothingness. Whether Summer will be there waiting for me, I can only guess. Whether I will walk through her door and see her laughing at that little yellow table with her mother and Chase and Autumn, and whether we will walk down the street to the sea hand-in-hand and have an endless summer on the shores of Jacksonville Beach together, I do not know. But I can pray.
I see her in my dreams, though, and that is enough. For now.
And hell, maybe the publishers won’t even read the book, and perhaps it will get lost in the hundreds of other books they receive every day that drop through the cracks like the life of a sick person, and they will never know the story of Summer and Cooper. But at least I know. At least I know that on the shores of this sleepy little town a very long time ago, a human named Summer Martin Johnson lived, and that she was special and perfect and wonderfully flawed and not to be forgotten, and that I loved her. I loved her in every way that a human can be loved. I know that many people may look at our story and see a love affair just like many other love affairs, in a town like many other towns, on a beach just like any other beach, during a summer like many other summers. But I know the truth. After all these years, I still look back on that summer with wonder. And no matter what happens now, there is a one hundred percent chance that at least one human – one Me – knows that story. And so with that in mind, I take one last look at the pier near where Summer glowed all those seasons ago, hold my hand over the email, and press Send.
I think I like those odds.
~
As the sun falls behind the palms in the western sky, I write one last poem for my Summer on my tablet, but this one is just for us:
When I think of you, I am twenty-five again
Back in that diner the night I realized you held my future in your hands
Grimy floors, low-hanging lights, your glimmering hazel eyes
And that laugh, containing everything I suddenly wanted from this life
If anyone told me it would end up like this, I would’ve laughed
Told them they were wrong, because you were all I had
Guess you can’t predict where the summer will take you
All I know now is that I would’ve paid my life to keep that view
Now every time you grace my dreams, I smile and cry
Because I know this isn’t a permanent goodbye
Time can’t pry these memories from me
And old age can’t wreck my brain, set my thoughts free
Darling, we’ll be young and in love and sitting in that vinyl booth forever
Huddled in that corner, laughing together
And now I can’t wait to ride this train to that next stop
Because I know exactly who I want to see waiting for me when I step off
Then I toss the tablet into the sea and get on with history, thinking that maybe it’ll count as one last swim for her. During a car ride, Summer had once told me all the things she’d want to do if she survived her surgery – she wanted to swim with the manatees she sometimes saw in the marsh down the street from her house, she wanted to kayak and kite surf like all the healthy girls her age, she wanted to adopt a baby. She never got to do those things, of course, but I’m making up for all the lost time I can. And I am not done yet.
I limp home alone in the winter heat, sneaking back into the nursing home tower through a side door. I notice that the young nurse on duty, Agnes, is crying quietly at her desk, probably because someone has died, or is about to die. I shrug and carry on. All is as it has been, and ever will be. I visited with my children just yesterday, so I’m not worried about myself.
Another nurse, Celie, stops me in the hall and hands me a pale pink rose from the bushes that grow out by the parking lots.
“Happy birthday in heaven to your wife, Mr. Nichols,” she says, her brown eyes shining. “I won’t be working tomorrow, so I just wanted to catch you today. You’ve been talking about this day for weeks. It is tomorrow, right? I’ve heard such beautiful things about Lily. She sounded like such a classy lady.”
“It’s not Lily’s birthday,” I smile as I take the flower with shaking, liver-spotted hands. “But thank you nonetheless.”
Celie sort of gasps and then rocks back on her heels. “But, Sir, you always talk about the woman with the December birthday. You mean you had a first wife?”
“…It’s a long story.”
Her eyes widening, Celie looks down at the corroded metal bracelet around my wrist as the realization hits. I never told Summer, but on the night of our first date, I came back to where we’d been on the beach and found the bracelet she’d lost in the sand. But I didn’t give it back – I wanted to keep it forever in case I never saw her again. And I’d worn it on and off ever since her death. I’d explained the story of the bracelet to Celie once while she gave me a sponge bath, telling her of how Summer had changed me and how I’d never stopped loving her, but I could tell she’d laughed it off as the senseless rambling of a fading old man reminiscing on an ancient summer fling. Everyone does –Summer is all I ever talk about, to be fair. “Let me tell you about my Summer,” I’ll say with gleaming eyes as I settle into a chair, even as their heads turn and they tune me out. Celie and I hadn’t spoken of her since.
“Mr. Nichols,” Celie says breathlessly, covering her mouth with her hands. “You mean the girl from the summer? Still?”
I smile and nod as a tear squeezes out of the corner of my wrinkled eye. “Still.”
I turn for the elevator, then pause. “Oh, and Celie? Could you make sure to have that Funfetti cake delivered to my room, like I arranged earlier?”
She is too upset to answer, so she just nods again with cherry-red eyes.
I ride the elevator up to my floor, creep down the hall to my room, and then lightly kiss the framed photo on my bedside table of myself and Summer under the Kissing Tree in my hometown all those years ago. She is beautiful forever, even in her wheelchair – this is the same photo that sits in her coffin only miles away. My favorite poem I ever wrote is on the back of her version: Life is brief but love is long. Somewhere between anger and love is an ocean of eternal tranquility. It is there that I will see you again.
“Hi, my little bride,” I say. The old man at the antique shop who’d told us about the Kissing Tree had been right about one thing: whoever kissed underneath it would find everlasting love. My love for Summer still burns in my chest like the fireworks of the July we shared together. He had been wrong about another thing, though: the two lovers wouldn’t die if separated, at least not immediately. Summer had made me strong and taught me how to fight. She found a broken boy and loved him back together, and I am so grateful. I never had to worry about the prophecy in my story Eighty Eight coming true, though, because she made me fearless enough to chase my dreams while there was still time. Most of them, at least.
“I finally did it,” I tell the photo of my bride, my gravelly voice sounding alien to me even now. “I finally wrote that book, all thanks to you. Aren’t you proud of me, sweetheart?”
There is no response – not out loud, at least – so I grab the photo with my frail, arthritic fingers and place it on my bed along with the rose. Since tomorrow is her birthday, I don’t want her feeling lonely. And I could use the company, too. Nobody gets out of here alive – I’ve learned that much by now. All you can ever hope to do is leave this bittersweet symphony with somebody you love by your side. I found my someone, and she’s right here, even if she’s long gone.
As I sink onto my mattress and slowly take off my slippers, a dullness creeping up in my left arm, I glance at the plasma screen embedded into my wall, which displays an endless loop of photos of my life post-Summer to remind me of the happy times. There I am riding on the backs of manatees as they floated through the crystalline springs of central Florida; here I am kite surfing on the olive waves off the coast of Jax Beach on an August afternoon; there I am smiling next to my wife in an orphanage with our brand new daughter we’d just met for the first time, a daughter we named Summer. Finally, there I am, battling the mountain rapids of North Carolina in a kayak as a young man, strong and brave and happy. Those moments are gone now, washed away by the seas of time, but the memories remain. The summer remains.
I drape a sheet over me and my bride, place my hands over my chest and clasp my fingers together with the pale pink rose held tight, smile up at the ceiling, and drift off into the grey.
In my dream, a shark bites at my fishing line, but instead of grabbing the pole and fighting like hell, like usual, I simply smile out at the glowing ocean. I have fought enough for one lifetime. It is time for sleep. It is time for a tranquil sea.
It is time for Summer again.