There are summers
that arrive after the harvest.
Not true summers—
not the oh-so innocent green kingdoms of June
where children believe every road returns them home—
but the late warmth
that steals across new September fields
after first frost has already bitten the earth.
The old people called it Indian Summer.
A season out of sequence.
A mercy the year does not owe.
That was always you.
Not spring.
Never spring.
Spring belongs to promises.
You belonged to recurrence.
I first saw you dancing barefoot on a northern beach
while somebody’s older brother played crackling radio songs
through a speaker full of sand and static.
Nineteen-seventy-eight, us both but eight years old.
The lake breathing softly behind us.
You turned in circles with your hair full of sunlight,
and the dusk itself seemed briefly astonished
that something so alive had entered it.
"I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair."
I did not yet know the names of the things I felt.
Children almost never do.
We carry whole mythologies inside us
before language arrives to imprison them.
So instead I watched your feet move over the shoreline
where driftwood and bottlecaps and ugly old Barbies
and tangled line with rusted *** Thompson treasures
slept beside the waves,
and I remember thinking—
with the terrible seriousness children possess—
that if I followed you closely enough
I might someday understand beauty.
Afterward came the summers of enterprise.
The kayaks lashed crookedly to old picnic tables.
Chocolate bars freshly-bought sweating in their boxes.
Sunburnt shoulders, as we pondered 300% markups
With algae lake-water drying light-green upon our skin.
We sold our little treasures to fellow-travellers and fishermen
like tiny river-bandits
too young to know the word "capitalism"
and too happy to care.
Those were the years we learned
how companionship becomes rhythm.
Paddle.
Laugh.
Shoreline.
Push-off.
Get lazy.
Just drift…
Sometimes memory is not made of events at all
but of repeated motions
performed beside one soul
so many times
they become prayer.
And always above us:
August.
The Perseids opening their bright wounds across the heavens.
God throwing silver spears into the dark.
We lay side-by-side inside dual-zipped sleeping bags
watching stars destroy themselves for our amusement.
You asked me once why people wished upon falling stars.
I nearly answered:
"Because something dying beautifully
makes us believe desire itself is holy."
But boys are cowards before revelation.
So instead I shrugged
and stole glances at many parts of you
when you thought I was watching the sky.
There are moments in life
so small no adult would notice them—
yet afterward they divide existence forever.
Your hand touching mine in darkness.
The pause before neither of us moved away.
The first mutual utterance of THAT word, that L-word.
The whole universe tightening itself around two children
while meteors crossed silently above us
like celestial signatures.
That first impossibly perfect kiss still exists somewhere.
I am certain of it.
Not in memory alone—
but physically.
Preserved inside the architecture of the cosmos
like two cuddled-up insects sleeping forever in amber.
Some nights I think if I drove north long enough
I would find it waiting there still:
the clouds gone
after such a storm,
the rain draining
through the beach,
every star in Heaven bowing
to your beauty alone it seemed,
the rippling, maybe trembling, August water,
your blonde hair silvered by moonlight,
our uniquely terrified bravery.
You once emerged from the lake at dawn
with water running from your body in pale rivers,
and because I was young
I mistook awe for permanence.
Forgive me.
Young men build temples too quickly.
But, Monique, how could I not?
The lake itself seemed unwilling to release you.
Blue water clung to your skin
as though trying to remember its own creation.
Even now, after entire lifetimes have passed through us,
I cannot think of holiness
without also thinking of shorelines.
Years unfolded.
Or perhaps folded is the truer word.
Because time did not separate us cleanly—
it returned us to one another
again
and again
and again,
always when summers were beginning to die.
Different lovers.
Different griefs.
Different houses lit by different lamps.
Yet there you were each time:
waiting somewhere beyond ordinary chronology
like a season refusing extinction.
We spoke in campsites, dining rooms, rented mansions, marinas.
We crossed lakes beneath weather-black skies.
We drifted through my fiancée's mother's garden-mazes while leaves
turned gold around us, and you recited "My First Love" without
warning nor explanation, because you were simply like that.
Me marrying your cousin while we confessed fragments of ourselves
the way exhausted travelers empty stones from their pockets.
And slowly, horrifyingly,
our unfinished childhood became deepest adult hunger.
That is the part no poet warns you about.
Not that first love fades—
but that sometimes it survives. With a vengeance.
Sometimes it survives marriages, funerals, decades.
Sometimes it waits beneath the floorboards of your life
breathing quietly in the dark.
And when it rises again
it does not return as innocence.
It returns as recognition.
By then we had become dangerous to each other.
Not physically—
never that—
but morally.
Because there comes a point
when two people must decide
whether longing itself deserves obedience.
And God help me—
for one terrible beautiful stretch of time—
in a pitch-black hallway after running
into each other, each holding the side
of a wall, afraid of the dark like little
children when maybe we should only
have been afraid of each other, and
when our bodies collided ALL choice
was taken right out of both our hands...
and then, after, we almost chose "yes".
There are nights I still wake remembering that season.
Not our bodies—
though they too remain like carvings upon heart's surface—
but the unbearable tenderness of it all, of her, and of me.
The way we spoke as though the world were ending.
The way ordinary antique lamps held their sacred fire in our dark.
The way your blue eyes carried equal parts joy and catastrophe
without me even being able to see them, how I just know,
because at last we had crossed into the life
we had secretly imagined since childhood.
You said we could still do it.
Leave everything. Spouses, cities, all of it.
Begin again somewhere near water.
As though our love was not merely emotion
but geography.
And part of me—
God forgive me—
Or maybe God **** me—
rose toward you instantly
like a starving thing toward a sacrament.
Because after decades of recurrence
after all those Augusts circling back upon themselves,
after every almost, every interruption, every farewell—
there we finally stood:
inside the door we had spent half our lives approaching.
And I had to be the adult in the room.
I had to close that door, despite my deepest desires.
Not because I did not love you.
That is the tragedy.
But because, oh, Niqui, did I... do I.
Someone had to remain awake enough
to understand the huge blast radius.
Children believe love rescues the world.
Adults eventually learn
it can also burn the world down.
So I became the villain in my own mythology.
The one who turned away from my Eurydice.
The one who loosened his own hands from sheerest paradise.
The one who chose either mercy
or cowardice—
and even now I still do not know which.
That uncertainty is the true haunting.
Not losing you.
Not even leaving you.
But never knowing whether I abandoned our destiny
or saved our souls.
And still—
after all the winters that followed—
I feel you sometimes.
Arriving across memory
like warm air after frost.
Indian Summer.
Late light upon harvested fields.
The world briefly becoming golden again
just before the cold...
"All my ways she wove of light
Wove them all alive,
Made them warm and beauty-bright...
So the trembling, ambient air
Clothes the golden waters where
The pearl fishers dive.
When she wept and begged a kiss
Very close I'd hold her,
And I know so well in this
Fine, fierce joy of memory
She was very young like me
Tho' half an aeon older.
Once she kissed me very long,
Tip-toed out the door,
Left me, took her light along,
Faded as a music fades...
Then I saw the changing shades,
Colour-blind no more."