Summer Vacation

I can't get to sleep. I can't even get myself to try.

I feel as though I am at the verge of Summer Vacation, as though tomorrow is the last day of school, and then there it is: that magic moment when summer lies ahead of you and promises to last forever.

The Last Day of School. Dress pretty, put your hair in a bow. Sing songs of summer with the (dreadful) choir, and see that look of genuine relief and joy in the face of your teacher. And once it's done, run wildly into the Freedom, until that bow falls out and your shoes get scuffed. Read unimaginable amounts of books. Stay up until dawn, pick up the newspaper and lay in a hammock reading until sleep finds you after everybody else has had breakfast. Listen to birds who have no watches and needn't pay attention to them. Go night swimming. Go day swimming. Go drunk swimming and thank your lucky stars it was alright this time, too. September lies impossibly far away and you don't even really believe it'll come. Summer is here, there is only this moment, only this season, only this Life. This is the very beginning of it, before there are any summer days behind you, before the magic is at all tainted by reality.

"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best -- " and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.

Surely there is work to be done, surely I have to make ends meet somehow and pay my rent. But for this short moment, this delicious night, I am not concerned. I crank up the happy music, I put my face to the fan, and I laugh. Like a green, lush, lawn stretching its grass into the horizon, summer spreads out around me. I want nothing, if not to roll in that grass until the dark night sets and it's time skip home, exhausted, with grass stains on my skirt.