midsummer was unbridled sunlight. It was the sticky sweetness of June and the juice of a peach dripping down wrists and licked off of elbows and weaving around pinked fingers. midsummer was photos taken on film cameras and three people squashed into a tiny university hall room and salt lamps on all night. it was getting ready with one of us in the bathroom, one at the desk, the other perched on the bed. it was picnics and lakes and gloriously huge swans and the threat of ducks stealing our coveted lunch that we had walked a long way with. midsummer threatened to overrule every desire for autumn, threatened to steal away time and make you forget that hours had passed in deep sleep or fitful dreams or in the creamed pages of a novel. it was dreaming of the sea calling you from far off places that you won’t return to for a while. midsummer was staying up until 3am purely to create for the sake of creating, to harness chaos and dreams in order to make something worthwhile out of them. is this all there is? yes, this is all there is, the moon replies. above, stars, brutal and clear and distant. midsummer was finding god in the way that sunlight pooled onto running water and the way that the trees stretched to the sky and in seeing a deer disappear behind a tree, antlers twisting and contorting and tangling with overhanging branches, it was waved hair caught in the wind and the crunch of feet on grass and a new bird in the area. Sleeping in shorts and a huge T-shirt, I would wake to find ink staining my hands from the night before. it was swallowing espresso after espresso. It was leaking rose water and feeling hungry after dipping in the river, driving home during a dusty sunset with soft limbs and tangled hair and damp feet shoved into converse ready to shower as soon as I got home. I hear nightingales at night, all night, singing outside my room as the candles burn and burn and burn and dwindle and wax threatens to pool all over my desk and succumb to it. midsummer feels like falling in love and praying to an invisible god
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