AFTERWARD: AFTER SUMMER
BY SETH KING
I didn’t want to write this book.
After The Summer Remains, I wanted to be done. The book honoring my brother’s life was riding high, and I was content. I was happy with the ending I’d given my characters, because it was, after all, a true story, and I’d told the story of my brother’s life down to every detail. I knew they would all live forever in my head, anyway, and although I missed writing them, I didn’t want it to seem like I was throwing out some sequel as a shameless money grab. So for a few weeks, I did nothing. That’s when the dreams began.
The past few years of my life have centered around themes of life and death and rebirth. (I’ve always been morbid, anyway, perhaps because I was actually born dead and then had to be resuscitated and placed in the ICU for ten days.) When I was about twenty, a large amount of my family died very closely to one another, and their gravestones lined up far too quickly. First my mother’s parents died together, then my father’s mother died, and months later my brother died. Then his wife gave birth to his (surprise) child eight months later. When we introduced the baby to my grandfather and my aunt, who lived together, my grandfather died twelve hours later, and my aunt died a year after that. All this taught me that there could be life after death, because I knew I was surrounded by my loved ones even in their absence, as I continue to be. What I didn’t know was what to do with that knowledge. Then this book happened.
I remember its birth down to the moment: I was washing my hands in the kitchen sink one sunny spring morning when it felt like my head exploded. The voices came, and they wouldn’t stop. Summer, Cooper, Summer’s mom, all the characters in my book, reaching out, whispering in the night, tapping at the edges of my soul, begging for their tales to continue. When I went to sleep at night I was shown scenes I could hear, see, taste, feel. And soon I started wondering: why not just write it all down? Why not go back to the Summer?
In The Summer Remains I wanted to explore my brother’s life, and write his ending. In Invincible Summer, I wanted to explore his afterlife – both in his world, and in the lives of his loved ones that lived on. What would happen to us? Who was leading my family down here now that all our authority figures had vanished? Was anyone leading us along, or was it all really just a hopeless crapshoot? So many love stories are about two people falling in love, but really that’s only the beginning of the tale. What happens next? What becomes of I <3 U after RIP? So I finally started the book, and the adventure began.
The circumstances surrounding the creation of this book were the most bizarre of my life. I felt like the audience’s companion, the doctor’s surrogate. I didn’t write it, it wrote itself through me. Within three weeks I had written eighty thousand words. I have never been superstitious or even cared about anything beyond what was in front of me, but during this time I was surrounded by the unexplainable. I had premonitions fall into my head that turned out to be true, I was given visions of friends’ pasts that, when relayed to them, turned out to be entirely accurate. I even had a random “medium” email me and say that my departed brother showed her a vision of a pen in my hand, just to share how proud he was that he was writing a book through me. Writing this book was a rush of grief, a wave of joy – it was the single most intense creative experience of my twenty-six years. All I’d do was sit down, and then the words would start exploding for hours. Sometimes it felt as though they were coming from the cosmos themselves, and I was seeing something that other humans we’re privy to. Whatever happened, it wasn’t normal. It was almost unsettling, and at the end of the day I’d literally crash into bed, like I was an electrical cord that had burned up from trying to relay too much energy. Something wasn’t right, and I was physically sick every night from the exhaustion.
And then, about a month into the writing process, I found out the previous occupant of my apartment had killed himself exactly where my writing chair had sat. I moved out that day, and the dreams and visions stopped abruptly. But it didn’t matter. The book was done.
And now I give you Invincible Summer. Whatever it is, wherever it came from, here it is. I’m not asking you to believe. Hell, I’m not even sure if I believe. All I’m doing is presenting you with the results of a very strange period of my life. I have now closed the chapter on my brother’s story. Thank you for helping me lock the door.
And to Martin, my own invincible summer: thank you for this book. Even if you didn’t give it to me directly, you still saved me, and I wouldn’t be here without you.
Actually: scratch that. I’m going to choose to believe. So here’s my message back to you, Martin: I hear you, I love you, and I will see you again. And as for the last message you sent, that thing you tried to tell me in the cottage but didn’t: I hear you loud and clear, as much as it annoys me to admit. I’m working on it right now, actually.
And to the reader: thank you for reading this book. I will miss Summer and Cooper forever, but I am so glad their journey is over. They got their happy endings. Now go get yours.
Love,
Seth King
Florida
September, 2015
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seth King is a twenty-six-year-old American author.