Summer passed. I lost the last tendrils of it today, trailing off with packed up books and the things my life doesn't have room for anymore. Time dragged June out of me like a splinter, quarantined with the neat outline of my past, printed on a fraction of the map I know like a woman you buy a drink but never sleep with. July was about the same until anxiety pumped my eyes wide open to the coyness of time's glacial slip, and I was surrounded by dry land for miles, where there used to be towers of ice. After that I slowed down a little, kissed my parents, bought a few books, and somewhere between Salter and Hemingway summer swelled then expired.
Last night I dreamt I got into my car only to find a dead woman, her discolored skin hung on a skeletal frame sagging like it would melt off. For some reason she didn't alarm me. I buckled her seatbelt for her and drove the corpse around town, as if it were typical, though I was slightly concerned with the smell of her decomposing flesh. I only remember the dream because today, when I sat in my car, I panicked briefly once more about the fictional odor.
It's funny how things come back to you.
There's this Croatian band that I used to listen to, wandering along the cliffside's teetering rocky paths that crusted the Mediterranean island where I spent summers as a child. Recently I played one of their songs and was disarmed by the distinct sense that everything is temporary, so chronologically shackled to fragments of the things we used to experience. I feel that summer in my bones sometimes; the abandoned elementary school and cola with wine, walking home in the night to sails clanking and swaying and just swaying along with them. Now it's gone like this one, rotting still, with all the poems I hid in places I don't visit anymore.
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