Summer Sparks, Springtime Simmers

Unpredicted things happen, but no wisdom imaginable could have possibly equipped me to weather your easy charms. How did it happen? Not long ago you’d merit a casual shrug or a skilled detachment from me: You are way out of my league and I distrust fairytales and Hollywood endings. Now, this... How simple, surprising even, that it only took us a casual drink to cast all creeds of self-preservation and send them reeling into a wild tailspin. I am trying to sober up from that laughter-laced moment when we discarded our respective cares and flung open the doors to our well-guarded vulnerabilities. I am not laying the blame entirely up to myself: You have muddled up the precise mechanisms of logic, and, in a disarming way, seized my attention into that of ripe interest. I was enraptured. You lobbed my misjudgments. You made me absorb the kind of depth and substance I have miscalculated to be not dwelling beneath your coy giggles, your bright eyes, your lovely face. The more I seek suitable explanations to justify my confusion the more I wanted to lock out the cautious howls of reason. There are a hundred raison d'êtres waiting to take place as to how we shouldn’t encourage this thriving closeness. But the more I inch them out towards the edges of my mind, all the more they dodge my grasp and quiver into lucid scenes of familial tales and ecstatic anticipations of flights that streamed out your intoxicated laughter. I had intended to rhapsodize these things through writing, but suddenly, language fails me. It is as if for the first time I do not wield supremacy over words. It is as if they refuse to be committed into awkward phrasings. It is as if they resent being fossilized in clumsy shells of fumbling declaratives that speak no honor for that genial connection. So I struggle. I struggle because I would like to make it tangible. That I hadn’t just imagined it, that I hadn’t slide into the clutches of illusory wistfulness. I so desired for it to be palpable, something I can sense like the brutal hiss and simmering of summer on the pavement. I would like to revel in it for a few breaths before I bundle and set it aside like old letters and creased photographs to be forgotten in old shoeboxes or buried under bedposts, attics or drawers. There, it would noiselessly wait for yet-to-come spring cleanings to be rediscovered, to be retrieved once more, with all the ascribed sweet melancholia attached to their memory. Like the awakening of rivers in springtime, it would flood back like forgotten lives, like a wistful smile that accompany remembrances. How can I ever tell you that on that I am still struggling as I write this? I continue to struggle because it’s inconceivable to bottle up your smiles, to preserve them like sweetened pickles for future consumption. I struggle because all these unguarded moments are uncertain, transitory, like the rhythm of our breathing as we toast newfound discoveries about ourselves. I struggle because I may not be able to faithfully reproduce our words as they disappeared into the din of the bar’s screamed conversations, raucous laughter and those sad sappy songs escaping the poundings of the live band onstage. It was a humid Wednesday and the smug calmness of summer night was upon us. But inside me, looking at you, it’s the most temperate of springtime. Inside, I’m weightless, soaring past the now fading blinks of the city’s lamp lights. Inside, I’m lost. Lost, but dancing.