Vindö

There was a different scent in the air this week, in the bicycle commute to work. The streets empty, the city in vacation, the few faces at the office tan with spare moments spent in the sun but that wasn't it. I just felt it in my lungs one night; it's been decided. And all the Swedish summer sunshine in the world could not change my heart: it is time to go home. 

All I see are steaming streets cooling with oncoming September winds, are the return of fall Mondays and don't wear white after Labor Day, normalcy returns to the city. All I see are my dreams, long slumbering, begin to take shape. 

We sat on the veranda, slow July sunset stretching across the isles and basking the pines in peach glows and birdsong, a long day's swim behind us, the brackish water staining my locks with salt and steam. I repeated again how breathtaking, how near Heaven, this moment, the one before, the many to come, but inside I knew. I had decided. 

Come fall, and dark nights, come terrifying winter and hopeless despair, I will be long gone. Once decided, how true the sentences sound. I can't plan for that in September. I won't be here then. 

You think I only play pretend. 

The days count down. You wait and see.