What is summer?

What is summer?

It's the shadows of the trees, the dimly lit pubs, the hot evening breeze, the sun, the streams, the heat, the youth, the bones, the crush, the noisy, long cicadas and bare white feet in the afternoon, the lazy, messy hair and the rumpled sheets in the bedroom.

I used to spend many summers wearing short sleeves and leaning against the railing of the windowsill with friends drinking cold coke and chatting. Across the window was the sea, downstairs was the courtyard where high school students laughed and played after school, a gentle-looking girl stroked a white cat, and a teenager with a popsicle in his backpack stood by. These are the summer, and the soft and distant trivialities derived from it.

The old home is in the south, a small town with a simple quality. I was an ordinary teenager there. I woke up after a long nap in the summer, dressed and washed up, hastily brought my textbooks, and pedaled to school on a somewhat dilapidated bicycle; my carved and cluttered desk hid undelivered love letters and carried some feelings of adoration.

In the evening, I played the flute in the house, and the sound went far away through the open screen window with the evening breeze, and sometimes scared away a few singing cicadas. I have also sent home someone who has been with me for a long time, a ringing finger at the bottom of the building to light up the dull yellow light in the stairwell, hearing the door close before leaving, even though her house was on the second floor. It was a girl who liked green.

I will always remember the way she smiled in that nice green rag shirt, so pure and so beautiful. She was less than seventeen, with a warm face, and took me to see fireflies and the faint starlight set off by the city's neon in the summer. I love her flower tea, light and slightly sweet, just like her. She learned to look like an adult to touch the tea bowl with me, met my gaze will sometimes coyly in front of the hair behind the ears a toss, and sweetly bloom smile.

I was struggling to untie and be pushed into adulthood in such a summer, and I didn't even have time to look at the light around me before the summer was over. So logical, yet so abrupt.

As for the girl, I didn't have a future with her either. I didn't have a cell phone or her contact information, and I cut off contact with her after I moved. Some things just happen naturally, without reason, and without reason.

It's like deleting thousands of photos from your phone by mistake a few days ago. The majority of these photos were saved last summer. I watched thousands of photos disappear little by little, memories of last summer, memories of my high school exams, memories of my eighteenth year, disappearing little by little, they will no longer touch me, they will eventually not touch me anymore.

We all walk respectfully among the corpses of time in our page-like garments. The glasses of my friends' wine clinked together, interrupting my thoughts. For a moment I seemed to go back to those summers, the summer when she looked at me with a tea bowl and smiled, the summer when the wind had a strong scent of gardenias. A friend shook a cup at me, I smiled at him to show rejection, he also responded with a smile, each other's hearts were like a clear mirror.

The final is gathered like flying frost that refused to melt, scattered like dust each west-east.