“I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa,” Summer

This will all be over soon. All will be well on the first day of summer. It will come, and when it does, I will be ready. The plan:

I will leap out of bed, out of doors. Perhaps stop for shoes, if I must. Stop to kiss, tickle, sing you awake, off key. No headlines today. Jazz! Loud, swinging, band-of-alley-cats jazz. I will dance you out of bed. Out the door. No time for coffee! We had months, confined, to drink that!

On the first day of summer, you’ll take my hand, or we’ll race, as far and fast as our feet and lungs will carry us,

To the river.

Better, to the sea! A daybreaker dance party on a beach. Hundreds of people in flashy swimsuits doing The Macarena. The beat! Jumping in time, spilling pink and yellow drinks topped with little parasols. Candied cherries and thick, juicy, dribbling chunks of pineapple.

Waves. We’ll wade into the water. Thumbs out. We’ll hitch a ride on the first sailboat, fishing boat, raft. Preferably, an ocean liner.

En route to… wherever! Rotterdam? Cape Town? Liverpool?

To Buenos Aires, where we will sniff out the sweaty, sensual, underground tanguero scene. No need for a hotel room. We’ll spend the night in a club. Then danced out, sexed out, at five a.m., we’ll have revuelto gramajo. The messier, greasier, eggy, cheesier, the better, wherever, at five, is open. Then we’ll have that coffee you wanted. Follow the smell of beans roasting.

We’ll drink buckets of it then promptly fall asleep on a park bench. The sun will rise. We will wake up, see motorbikes for rent. We’ll ride them to Caracas. A la Che Guevara. Meet strangers on our way and discuss books, philosophy, politics. We’ll lie on our backs in open air, open fields, under open skies. We will count stars. We will be able to see stars. It’s been a while.

We’ll reach Havana. We’ll drive around in the past, drinking rum, in a 1950s Chevrolet, cyan, convertible. To the port, where we will board a cruise ship, transatlantic. We have time to cruise. Summer will last forever. We’ll be Columbus, in reverse.

We’ll land. We will discover Europe, the only way it can be: in art. We will do the Grand Tour, stopping for days in every museum, at every painting, sculpture. We will listen to every musician playing on a street corner, pose for every fledgling portraitist, kiss in every mass transit system. We will miss our metro stop, turn back, kissing, miss it again. It will not matter.

We’ll bike from village to village in Cinque Terre, ride the Trans-Siberian Rail across ten time zones, meditate on a Himalayan mountain. Climb coconut trees, or try. Fan ourselves with banana leaves. Practice yoga at dawn on a deserted Goa beach.

I will write a novel, one page at a time, each in a different café, in a different city, in between sips of coffee and buttery morsels of pastry. By the time I finish it, I will have seen, tasted, lived, and written the world…

When all this is over, when confinement ends, on the first day of summer.

Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Who knows when or where or who we and the world will be when life begins again. Meanwhile, this morning, in the midst of lockdown, confinement, on my windowsill, the orchid bloomed. All six buds at once. White and resplendent.

“I realized, through it all, that…
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

I think I will start writing that novel today.

On the first day of summer, I will probably go for a walk. A long one, not to the grocery store or around the block. Shops will be open, non-essential ones selling bathing suits, sunglasses, flowers. There will be tables and chairs set outside coffee shops. There will be people, sitting, not alone, drinking coffee or tea, in cups. Actual porcelain cups, with saucers. No face masks. There will be sun.

I will sit down at an empty table with my coffee and pastry, and continue writing, whatever page of the novel I will have reached.