THREE MONTHS LATER
“…We will wander through the warm winds of summer’s wreckage. We will welcome summer’s ghost.”
– Henry Rollins
It is March 15. Three months have passed since Summer’s birthday. Winter is over, and the world is waking up again. And even though there’s still a bit of a chill in the air, I am all the way warm inside, because I just got a gift. Summer Johnson graced my dreams again last night.
I have now been without Summer for much longer than I was with her. A few months ago I wasn’t sure I was going to choose to remain here, but I think I’ve decided to stay. And ever so slowly, I am starting to see in color again. I’ve been reading and reading my diary over and over again, writing down everything I learned from her, and the lessons are breathing life into me again. I also signed up for an exercise program called Crossfit where I get to lift weights and yell like an asshole, and that has helped get my anger out a bit. I’m not such a rage-o-holic anymore, which is a small victory, but still a victory. Looking back, Summer taught me that in the grand scheme of things, getting up and doing one thing better than you did it the day before is a success. Sometimes just getting out of bed and facing the world with a scarred face is a victory, and sometimes saving the life of a lost and angry boy is a victory. But a win is a win, and there’s no getting around that. I think I know that much by now. Actually, I always knew it – I was just too hopeless to admit it to myself.
When I see her in my dreams now, she’s not sad or mad, quite the contrary. I’m aware that she’s close, and though I can sense her presence, I can’t see her. I just know she’s there, smiling in the wind, hair flowing. And the big difference is, I’m not pushing her away anymore. She’s still here, somewhere, somehow. And I have decided to welcome her instead of run from her.
I’ve been thinking about the future a lot. Mainly about what the fuck am I going to do with myself. I’m a quarter of a century old and I have no real job, no degree, no job experience, no game plan. Other than to write, at least, but that’s only a vague shadow of a plan. Thinking about all this scares me shitless, but soon I’m going to have to decide something. And what will I do about the whole wife situation? All my friends are settling down into domestic bliss, or some nightmare close to it. One of them even has two kids. Two! I can’t even take care of myself on the weekends, and he’s two years away from having schoolchildren. When did I let myself fall so far behind? And how will I even be able to look into the eyes of anyone else again?
Maybe I’ll love again. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll become a priest or a hairstylist and swear off women forever. I don’t want to even think about it yet, though, because I will never again find a love like Summer. I wanted her forever. But her influence is everywhere, and that influence is more apparent in me than anywhere. I am a writer. I am a writer because Summer made me discover what I already knew about myself. I spent so much time searching for my place in the universe that I overlooked the essence of me: I am a writer. That doesn’t have to mean I am some pretentious hipster snob who sits in coffee shops talking about the screenplay he’s working on. It just means I’m me, and that I happen to like writing. Summer made me find me.
But that doesn’t mean the sailing will be calm and glassy. Am I fucked up forever? Probably. Will I ever totally get over my anger? Probably not. I am already dreading my birthday, for example, because I know it will be an unavoidable marker of how quickly time is leaving her behind. I don’t know if I’ll be okay, but the difference is, now I want to be okay. And that’s enough.
I look up at the sky, smile. Open my lips just a bit.
“I swear I’ll never forget your hazel eyes,” I say, even though I don’t really know who I’m talking to. “I swear I’ll never forget the summer. And if you can, please come back to me. I miss you.”
And at exactly that moment, the sun breaks through the clouds and lights up my winter world.
~
I try to cook some dinner for my mom after that, but I can’t concentrate. And as I stare into our messy pantry, I am struck by a new thought: what if I’d never met Summer? What if she’d never existed?
Haunted by the idea, I walk to Waffle House alone. I still remember the nights I’d walk to her house after a full day of surfing. Oh, they were heaven, let me tell you. I’d bake in the sun all day, as all irresponsible kids should, and then wash up and head over. The winds would seem to carry me as I got closer to her front porch – I can still smell that sunflower scent that would rush over me as she opened the door, feel her hazel eyes washing over me, feel the satisfaction that she wanted to see me, too, and the nervousness that this realization fostered. The butterflies. That breathtaking feeling of being swept along the wide relentless horizon towards happiness. All of it.
If I’d never met Summer, my life would be so easy today. She taught me how to love and then took it all away again. I would’ve had a hundred less arguments, a thousand less sleepless hours, a million less haunted thoughts. And I’d still be dead inside. I still probably would’ve killed myself eventually, but that girl stopped me in my tracks and saved me. In a million more ways than one.
Hoping to quiet my mind by filling my stomach, I order half the stuff on the menu. As I drench my eggs with Tabasco a few minutes later, thinking about love you can’t run from, I look over at a sweet old couple a few tables over, and all at once it hits me:
I will never get that. I will never grow old with Summer.
I knew this, obviously, but suddenly the loss had never felt so real. I watch them smiling weakly at each other, talking about gardening or the weather or whatever it is that people who have decades of love between them talk about when there is no real need to fill the comfortable silence. I see the wife blush when her husband tells a joke from the newspaper, I see the husband helping her wobble up and limp down the hall when she needs to use the restroom. And for some reason I start crying right there in the booth. I would never help Summer stand after our knees stopped working. I would never watch her run a comb through silver hair, I would never get to take her knobby wrist and lead her into a restaurant bathroom, I would never hold her hand in a white hospital room as I readied to let old age take me away to whatever comes next. Two humans in love were supposed to let that love throw them into old age together. This wasn’t natural. I thought I was getting better, but maybe I’m not. A young healthy boy is still in love with a ghost, and it is the worst thing in the world.
But then I swallow and reconsider, once again. I am sitting there, as the loving and thoughtful and emotive man I am, because of Summer. I think of the oak trees and the sea and her pier and her laughter and all the other things she had opened my eyes to, and I imagine never getting to feel that summer of fleeting love, that trauma that broke me and then put me back together as a better human. Sure, I wish I could hold her. I wish I could kiss her forehead. I wish she wasn’t in the ground. More than anything, really. I will see her in every sunset for the rest of my life, look for her in every undulating ocean wave until the end of days. But as I sit at that grimy table under that flickering hanging light, I decide once and for all not to let this end me, too. That would be the ultimate disservice to my eternal baby. I’ve gotta fight for her. I’ve gotta keep swimming. Not just her, but for her family, too.
Oh, she loved them so much. The only pictures she ever posted on social media were of her little brother’s big life events – first day of school, Thanksgiving school play, a Christmas trip to see family in Savannah, etcetera. And I will be happy to start standing in those photos next to her brother, in her place. Sure, I’m not the best seat filler, but I’m around and I’m available, and there would be no greater honor than to pick up where she left off. And if I get depressed and disappear, her brother will really have no chance. It’s all on me now, and I’m gonna do right by that kid. Starting tomorrow.
The old couple returns as I sit there alone. And right then and there, in that shitty Waffle House booth, I say goodbye to the tomorrow I will never get with my wife. She wasn’t my angel of death: she was just an angel, picking me up off the cold hard ground, dusting me off with her love, and preparing me for whatever comes next. After all, we didn’t have to meet. I didn’t have to download that app at exactly the same time as her and come across her photo and meet her that day. We met for a reason. She was sent to me. And I will spend the rest of my life figuring out why.
And maybe this could be looked at as being a good thing, too, the fact that Summer will stay young and beautiful in my memory forever. I got the best of her, and I’ll always think of her that way. I believe you get to choose in life how you’re going to remember things, and I know she will always be the pristine rose I saw in that casket – her petals will never wilt and fall away. She is young forever, and she will never fall apart in my mind. Because what I feel, this is romance. It doesn’t matter that she’s dead. This is dead romance. This is bad romance. But still, it’s romance. And nothing can ever take that away from me. From her. From us.
I take a bite of my waffle and swallow hard. Summer didn’t wreck me. She rescued me. If I could go back to that golden evening when I met her there on the sandy steps of Joe’s Crab Shack, knowing what I know now, that I would only get three months with her, and that it would lead me down the most horrible road of my life, I would still give her that hug and walk up those steps with her. I would go back and live those three months with her all over again – in one fluttering beat of a human heart.
In the parking lot I take out my bag containing all those mementos of our time together. I’ve still never told anyone about this, not even my mom. A lock of her hair I cut off at the hospital, some things from her desk that I dumped in there during a visit to her house, her letter that I printed out. And for one of the first times, I’m not angry. I’m just grateful. I’m at the edge of a cliff, but instead of looking down, terrified of what is below, I’m looking out. And there are mountains on the horizon.
A slip of paper flits to the ground. I pick it up and see that it’s from Saviour’s book, about her friend who died from some type of cancer, and Summer had highlighted a line. I pick it up and read it with watery eyes:
If I leave, I will come back. I swear it on every lifetime I’ve ever lived and more. Whatever humans are made of, we come from the same thing. If we’re stardust, we exploded from the same star. And we will rise. We will join again. I promise. Do not mourn me, for I have been set free to fly – and I will fly back to you. It is written.
Tears wet my cheeks as my stomach drops and I stare into the sun. What in the living fuck is going on?
So then I decide to write her something, since she’s possibly sending me all this. I take out my phone and tap this into my notes, just in case she’s up there, just in case she’s listening. And this time, I really try to impress her with my poeticism…
“That one summer. Everyone’s got one, that fleeting season that rearranged you and imprinted itself onto your soul forever. You were mine. I swear I’ll never forget your hazel eyes. I swear I’ll never forget those few months when the winds roared. I’ll always think of you that way. And if you can, please come back to me. At the end of the day I’m just a boy who wants to get back to his first love, and I miss you. Just find a way back, please. I’ll be waiting.
Until then, I’ve got nothing…”
I look up at the sky again and feel my brow crease. You know, I’d always heard your first love never leaves you. Life is a long road of heartbreak, and the first big bang, the first one to make you go black, leaves a mark forever. I just didn’t take it to mean anything like this. She’s still around – I can feel it everywhere now. But what am I going to do about it?
I go for a drive after that, touching road, slapping pavement. As I speed down Third Street I imagine her face riding beside me outside the window, hair blowing in the wind, watching me. The vision feels strangely real, and yet I am not afraid.
I am in love.
I park and take one last walk down the beach. Jax Beach. Summer’s beach. And I know I’ve got to say goodbye to all this, at least for a while.
Windswept clumps of foam pile up against the shore, a bubbly chaos floating around me, and I have to shield my face from the wind to keep the sand from blasting my skin. It is the golden hour, that time between day and evening and night when you can just make out the faintest of stars, and suddenly another thought surges into me: what if she’s still here? What if she never left? What if I’m not crazy after all?
I walk down the shore, the world whirling around me as if in slow motion, as the scenes of last summer start to play before me. I see Summer walking up to me as I stood in front of Joe’s, those few steps that changed the courses of both of our lives for the long haul. I see her sitting in the car beside me as we drove to Support Group, lost in a haze of summerlove, as she laughed like nobody had let her laugh in years. I see us on the beach at night, this beach, as she leaned against my shoulder and cried. I see us kissing under a palm and an oak, forever intertwined, as we tried not to giggle at the old ladies judging us from across the street. And I watch myself running down the hall at the hospital as the life left her body, pleading with Gods I didn’t believe in to spare her. But for the first time, seeing these visions doesn’t feel shattering. It just feels beautiful. The world was so lucky to have lost Summer Johnson. I don’t know much about this life, but I do know this: I’m gonna love her forever.
Suddenly I see a girl up ahead, a girl who looks like someone I once knew. She is there, but she also seems to not be there. She is a shimmering spirit, an elegant ghost, luminescent in the golden glow of a dying season. She looks at me, and I slide back into the summer. I think of all I was before her, all I could become after her. Our eyes meet, and she nods. I see you, she seems to be saying, with only her hazel eyes, just as she had when she was alive, for everything I was and everything I wasn’t and everything I wanted to be. And I am with you still. I will see you again.
Just as soon as she’d noticed I was watching, though, a large collection of foam drifts by in the winter wind, and then she is gone, and everything just slips out of me. And just like that, I give her back to the sea.
When a writer uses a semicolon, it means they could’ve chosen to end their sentence, but didn’t. Three months ago I decided to forego my plan to drown myself and stay on this Earth, for Summer, for everything she started and never got to finish. But what happens now? What am I going to do with this new chance? Will I fuck it all up? Will I be able to keep my head above water long enough to reach dry land?
Whatever happens, this is all I know for sure: I am back in the running. This is my second chance. This is my Act Two.