I WAS JUST TRYING TO BE FUNNY | ✓

▬ 06

SANCTUARY (DON'T FORGET TIME)

            Tears well in my eyes the moment I'm out of the shrubbery. The grass of the overgrown path tickles my ankles, humidity embalms me, and I fill my lungs to the brim with petrichor. I'm greeted by budding lily pads that float on the shimmering lake and the buzz of striped hoverflies. Aspen and maple wave at me in the breeze. Subhanallah.

Summer is one of those places impossible to believe as real; moments spent here become memories impressed onto film, rose-gold with something like nostalgia already in the present.

That's the best name nine-year-old me came up with when I discovered it: Summer. So that I could talk about it in public and nobody would understand, I'm going to Summer now. Rather uncreative but, as far as I'm aware, it served its purpose: I've never bumped into anyone here.

Vicky, the lake within Sufsdale city limits, is perpetually crowded regardless of season or time of day. This lake, Salver Waters as I've later discovered, is severed by a railway bridge and has no villas lining it. It's inhabited only by tangly marsh grass and skipping water striders.

It's mine without belonging to me at all. That's the best part.

Summer belongs to the laughs of generations past that still echo within the trough and the opposite shore, to the arguments woven into the beams of the bridge that looks a gust away from collapse. Metal rings are bolted to the edge of the wooden platform where a dock must once have been attached for the enjoyment of countless families, whilst, now, I'm left to jump in the water and heave myself back on using gaps in the bedrock underneath.

I like to think that East Trough was once — before the school's funding got severed and the running path that loops behind it was neglected by the city — a neighbourhood brimming with opportunity. There's a billboard on that running path, right before the fork of the faded trail that leads here, and it still exhibits a Thatcher campaign, though its promising sheen has long since weathered away and been covered in copious vandalism.

I consider the people who used to spend their free time here and how they've all moved on, not in a melancholic way, but grateful they've passed their joy onto me through the messenger of singing marsh grass. Maybe they simply don't need Summer anymore, not in the way I do.

I never told Naz about it. Maybe that's why we're not friends anymore: I never shared enough with her. I don't share enough. How do I learn to do so without the sense that once there are more participants than me and God, life is diluted, syrup divided into several glasses with less left for me and I've always preferred squash too strong?

Why am I only able to be comfortable in the presence of spirits and memory? Perhaps because I'm half-ghost myself now. Will I always?

My footsteps gain an echo when I reach the wooden platform and lose it again as I wedge off my shoes. My house, no shoes inside. I discard the rest of my clothes and, once left in my briefs, jump in at a run.

The water is freezing at first but by the time my head breaks the surface, I've adjusted to it. It becomes a cooling embrace to swim in. It's nearly eight and the yolk of the sun has sunk behind the hill and the railroad. Its glow still colours the sky, a few stray shoals dapple the surface and give a halo to the occasional leaf or maple seed pod that pirouettes from the trees.

I swim through pollen until the platform is ten metres behind me. There, already out of breath, I turn to float on my back and watch the sky. The lake is locked into hills and they turn it into a sound chamber; passing cars sound much farther than the distance to the motorway yet my own heartbeat booms all around me.