Summertime

By eight o'clock in the morning, it's nearing eighty degrees outside. During the day, it gets over ninety. Temperatures have been this way for the last week. Summer weather - it makes me forget where I am, think I'm somewhere I'm not. Grass swaying too tall, wishes floating overhead, the sun bleaching everything pale, burning colors. People I loved, now, too, bleached out memories. Just kids talking dreams - everything seemed so serious then, big decisions to be made, whole futures. I think I'm more pragmatic now, although I guess my life belies the statement, because here I am, wasting a legal education, making the kinds of decisions I was afraid to make back then. Where are they now? We cried at parting; that, too, seemed so serious. We weren't old enough yet to know that parting is a way of life. Over and over again we let go of the people we thought we could hold onto. Promises to write, but what was there to say? Once separated, we had already given away the best parts of ourselves, the parts that synthesized into understanding. Most of us felt very misunderstood. Maybe we were, too serious, too filled with angst and a drive toward something we ourselves didn't understand. Still don't understand. And here I am, changed and indifferent, but somehow still chasing the same dreams.