The world turns towards summer
The world is a far better one when there is more sunlight. Sunlight relaxes me. At the same time it causes me an acute degree of – pain, I guess – to walk around at night in the summer. When I hear the soft clicking of crickets, catch those brief flashes of fireflies and breathe in the thick humid air, it makes me hurt for older times.For that time when I first came to America: I never realised how different the air could taste in other countries, how richly different the sound of a summer night was.
What I hurt for is that sense of magic wonder when you first discover something amazing. When you first feel something that you could never have felt before if you lived your life on just one continent, in just one country.
Maybe it is the feeling of walking through a summer night on the metropolitan east coast of America. Maybe it is the sight of a vivid purple and yellow sunset as you cycle home over the Thames in the heart of London – which makes you want to scream at the top of your lungs because there is no other way to express how glad to be alive you feel at that exact point in time. Maybe it is that feeling when you commit the first 30 minutes of your life to talking in a foreign language, refusing to switch back into English at any cost…and then experiencing dizzy elation when you pass your test.
A word I’m hearing a lot amongst my peers is “intense”. It is a versatile, popular word. I’m now going to apply it to my grad school experience. Grad school has been intense. And yet when I crash home in the evenings I am usually burning for more. I am a person who gets a kick out of stress, hard work and intensity: I do not know if this is especially good for me, but that is clearly the way it is.
There have been some bad, upsetting times this semester. There have been weeks where I only got a chance to look at sunshine from behind a window. And yet the world hasn’t lost its magic.
In a couple of weeks the semester will end and summer will begin. Summer is good. I am looking forward to summer.
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