One-Hundred Days

Summer is always lying in the heat, with the heat racing across your face and back, as you wonder where your life could possibly go to leave you better off then you are now. Summer is letting your heart and mind relax, getting away from the city and school and the people you could never stand yet talked to anyway. Summer is more than just heat and vacation, it's a simply complex freedom that comes with worries and anticipation for the future that you realize isn't very far away at all.

Summer is the sun beating the clouds' way to your skin, to leave its mark on once pale and sallow flesh, left untouched by winters cold hands. Summer is relaxation, and thinking about how life could possibly get anymore simple and perfect, but worrying about staying unimportant, stuck at a nine to five job your entire life, where your dreams are tacked to the bottom of your shoes left to weigh down your already drowning heart.
Summer is every worry that could somehow live harmoniously with peace and freedom. It's those worries that you constantly push to the back of your mind from more pressing matters, but with summer comes free time and space which willingly lets these worries inside if only to find something of substance.

We lie in the heat, with the sun on our backs and our faces in cool grass that itches at our arms and legs. You talk about how we only have two years left before we leave this town forever, and while you know we'll come back, leaving for those four years has a definitive ending stamp on your future here. You are worried but cannot wait to say goodbye to these old buildings and streets that have seen you fall and dance and smile and fall in love. In my heart, I am more afraid than anyone to leave, but outside I cover it up with smiles and the words I can't wait to get out.

I'm going to a small town in the country, while you're hoping to go to New York City.
There's no real definite location of where I'll be going, but I like to think there is, to push away the doubt and worry that constantly gnaws at the back flesh of my mind.
In reality, none of us knows where we're going, not you or me or the other countless people we're leaving this town with. Maybe some of them know, because they going to stay here, but everyone else is as clueless and worried and scared as you and I.

I take your hand and remind you to relax when you start talking too quickly, a sign of how scared you really are, despite your fake depositions on leaving. I remind you that summer is about relaxation, and we still have a thousand more days to worry about these things.
You smile and nod and close your eyes and relax inside of the heat.

I press my face into the grass and close my eyes.
I keep the thing that has always kept me from relaxation and freedom to myself.
The thing I'm most scared about leaving, is leaving you.