some recent work:

I have very little to show for this summer. A pile of fireworks in my room I bought half price in Indiana from a stand on the side of the road and never set off. A summertime supply of sparklers, Chinese lanterns, tiny tanks, firecrackers, roman candles to point to the sky. A newly acquired scar on my left thumb, the holes still visible where the thread went in and pulled the wound together, four on each side of the slanting line across the bone. It still hurts when I bump into a table, when someone squeezes it too hard. And I don't even have a good story about how it came to be. I have piles of books I bought at library book sales, books I bought that I haven't read but felt I should. Books like Madame Bovary and James Joyce story collections. I have a newly found love of Phil Collins, something that started as a joke at the beginning of the summer, and now has developed to a mark of shame and guilty pleasure.

 And then there are the things that I can't prove happened this summer- nights drinking wine out of empty jars, a trip kayaking down the Wisconsin River, the Wabash River, where in some places it was shallow and I had to get out and push, ending up muddy and sunburnt but never happier.  There was the brief week I spent with a kid named Hernandez, crashing parties and telling everyone we had just gotten engaged, stealing their booze, and they were all so drunk they never questioned how no one knew us, they just toasted to our happiness with red plastic cups and cheered. We held hands and kissed for them, put on a marvelous show, talked about a wedding in Cancun which they ate up, stared into each others eyes longingly. And then I got tired of pretending to be in love and I stopped answering his phone calls. 

There is so little proof for the things that happened to me this summer, the changes I feel. It was an awful purgatory, a transition, and I'm ready for a new season. It is over and for the first time in my life I am welcoming summer's end.