Remember summer?

Me neither.

I was looking at some phone pictures leftover from the summer, and it was like looking at someone else’s photos—browsing through someone else’s life. I looked at the pictures and I literally could not remember the events leading up to the snapping of said photos. It’s like an entire three-month chunk of my life is just gone. Wiped clean. Tabula rasa. Like summer never even happened.

Just look at this incredible view out some girl’s backyard circa July 2010. The night before this photo was taken, the girl with the phone had slept in her bed with her bedroom window open—wide open, with the gentle breeze of summer smells lulling her to sleep. When she awoke the next morning to the slow billowing of her white sheer bedroom curtains and saw the breathtaking fog hovering outside her window, she reached immediately for her phone on the bedside table and snapped a quick photo. Then she yawned, stretched, got out of bed and ate a delicious ham and cheese omelette for breakfast (made by her own personal chef) and bathed in a shower of liquid silk, and didn’t have to shave her armpits in the shower because she had had her armpit hair lasered off for thousands of dollars just days before. Also she had a book deal. She was happy then.

Just look at this girl: flip-flops. Short-sleeved T-shirt. Faintest hint of a tan. She looks so happy, so carefree, like she’d seen the sun that day and the day before and was guaranteed to see it the next day. What a ho-bag. I hate her.

Here’s a photo taken from the same place just six months later. It might as well be a different country.

Someone else took those summertime photos, and that someone was happy and carefree and probably really beautiful and had no pimples and no extra weight around her waist and also she was a millionaire.

No—billionaire.

Or maybe not but that’s how I feel when I look at these photos—I feel like summer is just as inaccessible to me right now as a billion dollars. Like I will never again be able to walk down the street in flip flops and short sleeves and just one layer of pants.

I don’t know when I saw the sun last. Or the colour green. I don’t know when I last took a breath of outdoor air that didn’t turn my snot to ice. I can’t remember what tomatoes taste like. I’ve forgotten the smell of grass.

If it ever comes back—summer, I mean—I vow to appreciate it more.

I will live a lifetime every day that sun rises and warms my skin.

I will pack away my winter clothes for reals this time, not just leave them hanging in my closet.

I will get rid of every pair of socks I own and wear nothing but strappy sandals from June to October, even when strappy sandals are inappropriate footwear for my chosen activities, like hiking.

I will hike this summer.

I will open the blinds at 5 a.m. and sit cross-legged on the living room floor until the sunshine touches my skin through the window panes and I will not move from my position cross-legged on the floor until 11:00 p.m. when the sun goes down once and for all.

I will give myself a brain freeze drinking an Icee™.

I will pick strawberries from the strawberry farm and eat them all—a whole bucket full—while sitting in my swimsuit on the back deck.

I will mow the lawn butt nekkid and laugh when my neighbors stare.

I will make popsicles out of freshly-squeezed juice.

I will buy a citronella plant for my back deck.

I will watch the July First fireworks from a lawnchair on my roof.

I will swim.

I will attempt to cartwheel.

I will find a pair of shorts I like and wear them every day.

I will eat a tomato sandwich.

I will eat ten.

If summer ever comes back, I will climb a tree and sit in it for an hour with a notebook and a pen.

I will figure out how to hang a hammock once and for all.

I will roll around in my front lawn and take pictures of the grass stains.

I will save the pictures for the winter.

I will need them.

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