Melancholia for a Summer That Never Was
It was never real.
There is a tragedy to life that cannot be grasped.
A melancholia, a longing, that goes deeper than love, anger, fear. A crisp certitude of being lost, of just barely holding onto sanity when everything screams at you to take the plunge, embrace the abyss; when texture crackles like the static of that 1990s TV set you spent your childhood around.
Sometimes, the memories appear like tragedies. The happiness drained out of them, color out of space, tainted by life. To be a child is to be innocent, oblivious, and, pure and simple, happy.
Don’t you wish you were a child again?
Parents as gods, all-knowable, ever-loving, faultless in all their faults. That unconditional, uncomplicated love that can never return. Life, all those disappointments and pains and terrible realizations, made sure of that. If ever there was a state of utopian innocence to humankind, a primal Garden of Eden where love and warmth reigned, then it must have felt like forever-childhood.
That weekend at the lake, that holiday on the beach, Adriatic bliss, a newborn nation just out of war, red-white checkerboards in the wind, a bright tomorrow, the sheer joy and sense of adventure, two weeks away from home like an eternity. All so novel and exciting, the hot sun like the embrace of something greater, that which cannot be grasped. Sand to be formed into whatever, underneath the pavement. Dinners with cozy burgers and fat fries, iced tea and iced cream, a salty ocean and dry hands, curly hair, tchotchke and Kodaks, warm breezes and warmer smiles.
Summer, forever. People you love, people who love you, people who will always be there.
Until they are gone.
Death would be simple, but reality is not. There is that melancholia again, what the Portuguese call saudade, ‘an emotional state of profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent something or someone.’ Instead of finality, one is confronted by that hazy process of slow estrangement, separation, isolation, hallmarks of the modern gray. They have never been perfect, far from that, and neither were you.
And neither was that golden past.
For, it did not exist, not really. Memories are a tricky thing, a cheap prank played by the brain, yours truly, drowned in chemicals. They are not real. And, so, neither are you.
It was all but a dream, and the fissures have become gulfs; long ago you have taken the plunge. It all fades into that gray and unremarkable.
How absurd.
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