Anthem

Ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything
that's how the light gets in

-Leonard Cohen

Dear Summer

Hi. I think we'd better talk. Because the days are getting shorter and colder, and you are slipping from my fingers with an inevitability borne of axis imperfections and star alignments, and I'm afraid to let you go. I don't think you're surprised, summer. You knew how it would happen. You know the danger you are to the restless heart.

I have been back now for over a month. More than thirty days of hanging your snapshots on my walls and telling stories of you to remind myself you were real and waking up from dreams to realize I can't remember how it felt to be held in his arms. I'm finding that your absence is leaving room for cold things, for self-doubt and uncertainty and twisted flaws to creep under my floorboards. 

You offered me this vision, you see, of what life could look like if lived with a willingness to throw my heart wide open. I lived within this dream, worked long hours to find it, burned and cut myself in my heady desire, poured it out with endless coffees, searched for it alongside the chipped and tangled souls I found were an equal and essential part of this dream. In the end, I was walked to it by many who were also willing to be part of this idea, this community born of a generosity of spirit that amounts to grace. Summer, you let me realize that my ideals were more than ornamental, but that they need to be taken from their glass cases and used for the practical purposes for which they were made. Some were cracked or broken in the process, and I learned that this too is okay. Glass shines even more when you can see the cracks, and I learned to not assume it needs fixing but to recognize it as beautiful and meaningful.

And while I was doing this, summer, you offered me a million things to fall in love with, and then dared me to do it. And I did. I fell in love with a yellow stone house and a home full of strangers and streets that never travel straight and the sound of ovens opening and the way he brushed my pinkie finger driving down those country roads at sunset. But then I left, as I knew I would. With his fingerprints on my waist and a handful of promises we barely tried to keep.

And this isn't a sad story, summer. I came back to a home with dried flowers and art hung walls, a ceiling covered in stars and a door that is always opening to welcome people that I love.Yet still I'm restless. And still I'm tired of sitting when I know what it means to simply do instead. And still I'm finding scars on my heart from you, from everything I did in your name, from each perfect moment that follow me now in dreams and unwritten love letters. But this is not a tale of regret summer, though I handed out pieces of myself that I can never retrieve in order to cling to your magic, and now I wonder how to fill those holes. What I gave was no more than what I was given to hold, I think. Fusion has its costs.

Summer, I am bad at goodbyes. Because my heart is aching for you still, and it might go on doing it until I see you again. It might take some time, summer. I can't promise who I'll be when you see me next, what weaknesses and follies will be mine. I have spent a month without you and already I am afraid I'm losing the woman I was when you were mine. But I know that I will love you summer, always. Will you wait for me?

-M