SUMMER LOVER

i felt robbed, like i’d arrived at a breathtaking landscape only to find i’d lost the ability to see.

in the summer, the lines between heaven and earth fade into meaninglessness. warmer bodies make for warmer hearts, and summer lovers, summer flings, they belong in those few months in the middle, with the sun, the sand, and the sanctity. montana summers are especially striking, characterized by a brief period of rain and flooding until the sun cracks riverbeds and the forest service warns of wildfire. 

i met him before the summer aged into haziness and danger, when the purple indian paintbrushes are in their prime. in those rainy weeks, when the ground is first exposed after months of heavy snowfall, we wove our way through pine-full mountains while our hearts wove into each other. on our first night together, we passed a roadside diner, brown and shaky, perched precariously on a riverbank. we passed fly fishermen in beige, the trailhead i’d conquered the summer before, and expansive views of cliff and sharp rock. 

i drove us to a raging, spitting waterfall at golden hour. he grabbed me from behind and pulled me into our first kiss as flurries of mist danced around our heads. from that moment forth, it was as if his lips were the only ones i’d ever kiss. our journey home was dark and starry, made eerie by the starkly white fog that settled thick in the lodgepole pines. 

in montana, where the most abundant resource is space, space in the sky, in homes, backyards, and roads, it’s easy to convince yourself you’re all alone. often that’s because you truly are. he swallowed his loneliness and claimed he found sustenance from its bitterness. 

but somehow, in the suffocating, vast expanse of nothing, we found one another. and any inch of space between us felt even wider than the state we loved in.

despite its surreality and its limitlessness, our love had an expiration date. we poured our hearts out on pages of notebook paper, sonnets, declarations, empty promises we read aloud and cried over. and as that boy from the summer faded into memory, on the other side of the country i convinced myself out of love. 

i’d hoped that our love, like leaves, would grow large and wide, bright and full of life. come fall, it would age into orange, crinkle, and decompose. in turn, this banished love would nurture a newer, predictable sort of love in time for winter’s return.

so i laid our love to rest where it had formed—flitting above mountain rivers, dancing through the grasslands and pronghorn, mingling among crystal-embedded rock, bleeding into sunrises. 

in the fall, i found an artificial solace in dates with strangers, feigned interest, and quarter-hearted flirting. i wondered about the people that could become more than friends, the people i could return to, the people i might have been wrong about. i searched for the same sort of adventurous companionship i’d discovered in the summer.

i brought doomed singles to bright white sandy beaches, on two lane roads down the coast, into orchestral explosions of red and orange on forest canvas. they swooned and i slipped out the backdoor. everything left a sour taste in my mouth. and no stranger, no party-goer, no now-friend could offer me anything tangible. 

i felt robbed, like i’d arrived at a breathtaking landscape only to find i’d lost the ability to see. and one night, naked and rageful, i broke in half, and the last of my love poured out onto pages like these. 

this fall ushered in a romantic sort of nostalgia for a season i’ve been determined not to miss. and despite my best efforts, as leaves turned orange, red and brown, as they wilted and spun to the ground, i discovered the boy i truly wanted to bring to the beach, to show the views, to explore the world with, was 2000 miles and four months behind me.

ultimately, love cannot be willed out of existence any more than it can be forced into being. it pulls us, coaxes us subtly, often to the people that are safer to avoid. all the people, writings, justifications and escape plans in the world don’t undermine this reality. sometimes, we find ourselves back where we started, probably because we had no real reason to leave in the first place.

today, it’s his name that pours through my fingers, pen impressed on paper. it’s declarations to him that i sing in my dreams and images of him i use to awaken some dormant light in my chest. 

so in this stick season, as ice crystals embrace tree branches like diamond rings, i-90 ices over, and cabin hearths house modest fires, maybe i’ll find the resolution that will melt this old heart once again 

in the arms of my summer lover.

AUTHOR: Mason Scurry

ARTIST: Jacqueline Zhang