Summer
Summer is what you make of it. For the first time, I know exactly what I want to make.
Summer || Jamie || Priya || Beginning
Summer arrived in the specific way that Portland summers arrived — not with the dramatic statement of a city that had been waiting for heat, but with the quiet confidence of a place that had always known it was going to be beautiful and was simply waiting for the calendar to catch up. June became July became August with the slow, warm succession that made you feel the months as full things rather than passages between other things. I experienced this summer differently from previous ones, in the cellular way that everything was different now. Previous summers had been organized around the next school year, the next debate season, the next level of the plan. This summer was organized around itself. Around being in it, which was new.
Jamie and I spent the summer the way you spent summers when you were with someone you genuinely wanted to spend time with — not dramatically, not with the manufactured events of early relationships, but with the easy accumulation of ordinary days that were good because the person was in them. Saturday coffee became a ritual. We walked the city in the evenings with the comfortable wandering of people who had nowhere specific to be and liked it that way. We went to Powell’s and spent too long and left with too many books. We went to the farmer’s market on Saturdays and Jamie bought flowers with the specific eye of someone who knew which ones would last and which ones were worth getting even if they wouldn’t. We argued about books and about ideas and occasionally about which route to take to wherever we were going, and the arguments had the productive warmth of two people who were well-matched in every way that mattered and who knew it. Dad had Jamie for dinner so many times that he started texting them directly — coming Friday? — which was the highest honor Carmen Reyes could bestow and which Jamie received with the appropriate gravity and showed up for consistently. The tin box stayed on my desk. I did not open it often, but knowing it was there — knowing the story in it, the love it contained, the use I had been given for it — was its own kind of comfort. A reminder of what was possible when you chose the real life over the expected one. A reminder that I had chosen correctly.
Priya and Zara came back from their respective family vacations in late July and the four of us — me, Jamie, Priya, Zara — spent the last weeks of August doing the things you did in the last weeks before everything changed: beach trips to the coast, where the Oregon Pacific was its usual cold and dramatic self, and the sun was excellent when it appeared and the fog was its own kind of beautiful when it didn’t. Long dinners at Reyes, where Dad fed us with the generosity of a man who expressed love through abundance. Late nights on someone’s porch, talking about next year and the year after that, with the specific mixture of excitement and wistfulness that attended the end of a good chapter. I was going somewhere next year. So was Priya. So was Jamie. The geography would change. But I had learned this year, definitively and from the inside: the real things travel better than geography. The real things are not about location. They are about people, and the people would still be the people, and the phone calls and the visits and the letters and the specific effort of keeping close to the people who matter — that was manageable. More than manageable. Worth it.
On the last night of August I was on the back porch — the same back porch where Jamie had kissed me in February, in the cold — and the night was warm and the city was doing its Friday evening thing and I was alone for a moment with the specific feeling of a year coming to its end. Not an ending — that was the wrong word. A completion. The year had been a thing with a shape, and the shape was complete, and I was on the other side of it, looking back at the full curve of it. September to August. The index card to the tin box. The managed life to the lived one. The third card to the blank card to the true one. I thought about the resolution: authenticity requires courage. I thought about every answer I had given to every form of the question, and about the final answer, which was not an argument but a life. Which was me, in this moment, on this porch, warm in the August night, completely and uncomplicatedly myself. I thought: yes. Authenticity requires courage. And courage is cumulative and the first time is the hardest and every time after gets a little easier and one day you realize that what you thought was courage is just living. One day it’s just who you are. I was almost there. I was already most of the way there. Next year I would get there the rest of the way, in a new city with the people who mattered close and the people who mattered far and the tin box on whatever desk I had and the photograph face-up always, always face-up. The summer ended. September was coming. I was ready. I had been becoming ready all year. Now I was ready. The colors I carry — all of them, the full spectrum — lit the dark behind my closed eyes, and I thought: this is who I am. This is who I get to be. This is everything.