Aug 24, 2008 21:50
It's been a good summer. I've learned a lot, done a lot, gone places and written things and had a general blast. Everything's got to come to an end at some point, though, and tomorrow I'm headed off to school. I wish I had just a few more days of freedom -- I had so much left to do. But this year, I feel, is gonna be great.
I wrote something today after a little reflecting. Just a small sketchy thing. I wish I actually had this box.
She has managed to fit almost everything essential about summer into a small box. The box is plain, varnished wood that looks like it came in with the tide. Inside it is lined with blue paint, left over from the walls of her room. The shade is called East China Blue. It matches the hot sky exactly.
The box contains a number of things.
There are a half-dozen glass vials, clear and delicate enough to shatter at a drop. They contain the following:
A sample of yellowed sand from under the bleached-out beach umbrella in July;
Powdered lemonade mix, finer than the sand and deadly sweet, best if used by three in the morning;
Three pebbles, smooth-speckled and the size of her smallest nail;
One perfectly preserved maroon rosebud, from the bush intent on swallowing the neighbor’s mailbox without a trace;
Several drops of a perfume that smells like cut lawns drifting in through a window;
And a single tiny feather, grey and slightly iridescent at the edges.
The box also has these items arrayed in one corner:
One torn ticket stub from the first mindless blockbuster of the year, talked through, plot forgotten, and seasoned with soda;
A tuft of dried grass from an adventure involving blackberries and scaling power lines;
The scrap of brown paper bag on which she wrote a poem that has now faded away and fallen apart;
And three Polaroids of her dog nosing about in the garden, her desk with its unwashed coffee cup, and her best friend surveying asphalt from a car’s window, respectively.
She wishes very much that she could find a way to take the intangibles of summer and place them in this box as well. There is no way to record the roar-silence of breaststroke, trying to tune out the crowd and coaches and focusing on the black cross down the lane. She can’t capture the heat that stalks her home each day, breathing at the back of her neck like a sun-born panther as she passes the hum of the transformer. Sudden rainstorms and heat lightning in the curtains and the Top Forty station on the radio won’t fit. The startling cough of lawnmowers in the morning and the creosote scent of the railroad tracks are out of the question.
She needs a way to record these last necessary things. Summer can only exist imperfectly without them.
That is why, in the small wooden box, there is a sheet of paper.
These words are printed on it.
All is well.
metafic,
school,
stories