nobody really wants an endless summer

In my seventh-grade yearbook, Cristine Daley bade me one farewell wish: “Have an ENDLESS SUMMER!!!!” and she took up a comical amount of space with a sloppy drawing of a beach umbrella and a volleyball. This was one of many predictable and trite messages written on the yearbook as the 1994 school year melted into summer, but I always remembered that one because I thought it was maybe a thing people said about summer that I hadn’t heard before. HAVE AN ENDLESS SUMMER!!! It sounded like the title of a movie I never saw but had some light nudity and zany adventures that would definitely show me what to expect in my future as a teenager. Of course it is an actual movie title -- a surfing movie from the 60s, but I was thinking more of a cross between Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter is Dead and Beverly Hills 90210, the summer when Kelly and Dylan hooked up while Brenda was in Europe.

Looking back, the summer that followed was in some ways more endless than ever was possible before or after: in my recollection, it’s a solid loop of the same events each day. Rolling out of bed after 10, a sloppy bowl of cereal in front of The Price is Right until it turned to 11:00 and I could watch the new videos that were coming out on MTV and listen to the vivacious diffidence of Kennedy or wait for Kurt Loder to deliver the only news I deemed worthy of my attention. I had a crush on a guy who lived across town but whose phone number I had so I spent a lot of time on the phone, and when not, my two best friends came over and we watched MTV and ate Doritos and made prank phone class, sometimes played basketball, sometimes got someone’s mom to drive us to a movie. We had sleepovers and rode our bikes and it was before anyone had jobs and beyond being children, and it was boring and stupid in the best way possible.

Summers before and after 1994 were good, too. Camping and backyard parties and swimming suits and ice cream and bikes and all those cliché summer images are part of my childhood memory bank, like they are for a lot of people. College summers were boozy and breezy and happy reconnections with old friends and an easy job where I could take naps. There are a lot of years that I’m sure I would have given anything for an actual endless summer. When I sit with these memories, it’s so easy to believe that summer has always been a time of warmth and promise and rest and joy.

But there were, of course, an equal number of summers that were, in fact, not wonderful. Some of them were later in my life when I was dealing with adult problems that are much too boring to write about here. But none of them have run parallel to this summer like the wide abyss of the three months between sophomore and junior year – 1997, when I turned 16. Or was it the summer of 1998, when I turned 17? If I cut out the 97-98 school year and swap out some of the major characters, the summers were basically the same.

There were pale yellow afternoons, my bedroom wet with summer heat, and I’m shoving things into a backpack in a kind of hurried way – my journal, headphones, CDs, discman (!), pens. Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar. Biking three miles to a used bookstore at the back end of an empty strip mall and camping out by the “Classics” for hours, flipping through books, smelling them, reading the summaries on the back covers, feeling the creases on their spines and reading a few paragraphs here and there. A backpack full of books for less than 5 dollars. Follow some dirt paths to Green Isle Park and sit beneath a tree somewhere far away from anyone. Sometimes tears, other times just words on paper. Then dusk in my bedroom, the windows open and insects buzzing at the screens. Painting my fingernails or my toenails black or making anklets or necklaces out of rope and beads, waiting for my boyfriend to call. I watched a lot of junk television on those nights, but I also listened to a lot of Bob Dylan and spent more time tucked in that journal.

Don’t misunderstand me: I had a boyfriend, and when he wasn’t lifeguarding or getting high with his friends we would hike around at local parks and make out in his parents’ van or basement. I had a handful of friends I enjoyed spending time with, and there were some normal-happy-teen summer moments during both of those years. But what sticks out about those summers is instead a summer that was in fact a loop of lonely journeys in and out of anxiety and depression, of feeling and not understanding isolation and pain. Most of my friends had jobs or lived across town and I had no drivers license. I had had a fight with my friend group that year, and everything felt very fragmented and uncertain.

But.

I also remember during this time I began to have dreams with a recurring theme: waiting. Like, possibly the most boring dreams of all time. Waiting at a bus stop. Waiting for someone to bring me food at a restaurant. Waiting for someone to pick me up to go somewhere. I remember these dreams throughout high school, and I remember they stopped in college. In the midst of all the angst and sadness, I think what got me through these summers was how temporary they were. School would come again, and offer its own unique brand of misery, and I would be around people and things would happen and I would no longer feel cut off from the world. It was teenage life. I would get out.

Here, in the summer of 2020, I feel like we could cut out the last 22 years of my life and, well, it would be just like I had never left those summers. Isolation, sadness, tears. Far too much time with my parents. Far too much time alone with my thoughts. Brief interruptions for companionship with my husband, which I appreciate, but then dark retreats to my dark and frazzled brain. I am literally living in my childhood backyard and most days it feels like all the experiences I created since leaving home at 18 are illusions; I am a babysitter rather than a mother, and I am taken most days by unpredictable emotional upheavals and I supplant my life with that of the characters in books and television shows. If I just ended up here anyway, did I really ever leave? If I’m never allowed to leave again, does it even matter that I left in the first place?

These are the kinds of things that occur to me as I take meandering walks around this neighborhood with my dog after the summer heat has lifted. Sometimes I notice beauty and find peace on these walks.

Other times I wish to be walking down any other street, a street where I could notice or learn something new. I’m tired of walking past the same blue duplex and thinking to myself that Mary’s brother’s best friend Chris Kossow may or may not have lived there but also that he’s dead I think? But I’m not sure how, if it was a car accident or something, but that’s why Ray moved to live with her grandma in Kentucky during his senior year. I find no interest in recalling Cassie Gorbette upon passing her house on Sunrise Lane, how she used to snack on jars of baby food and was obsessed with NKOTB even into eighth grade, and was really into horseback riding and had a hot older brother named Sam and a horse named Jack. Every walk I remember the same things and have the same questions. Was Cassie's dad some kind of music producer? Why do I think that? Did she ever go into music?

I never remember to try and look this shit up when I get home, or maybe I intentionally don’t because it doesn’t matter.

Taking walks in the summer evening used to be my favorite thing, and when the pandemic took hold I was happy to be able to return to the practice I had not been doing very often since we moved in to this neighborhood. I used to enjoy this kind of varied nostalgia about people who used to live here that very likely don’t remember or care about me. But these walks are much less soothing during a pandemic wherein they are your only outlet.  When your reality gets fuzzy and unstable, when the most familiar streets become testaments to loss and change, when you are followed by a trail of indifferent and half-formed ghosts.

The pandemic has squeezed the joy out of so much and stolen our ability to pretend. In the adult life of the last few years, I’d think back to those summers in college when everything was bright and free of consequence, or the comfortable stupidity of 1994, and I’d long for an endless summer. I had forgotten in all these years that summer, like most things, isn’t meant to be endless. It’s only wonderful or tolerable or able to sustain a label because it is a temporary, fixed entity.

Until it isn’t.

Here in the endless summer of 2020, an endless summer of nobody’s choosing, I would trade all the comfortable weather and sunny skies, all of the long walks with my dog, all the extra time with my child, planting the garden, swinging in the hammock, all of it, all of it, all of it, in exchange for simple mercy on my sanity. For something that will reassure me that the sun is actually setting on this season of illusion and uncertainty. But most days, I wake up and the sun is baking the grass to a crispy brown before nine am, and it’s so hot, and I can’t escape it even when I’m inside and the air is on because the humidity seeps into the house and gets its fingers on everything.

This sun is not going to set for a good long time.