vicarious summer

Living vicariously through the delicate faded hues of these photos to emulate some form of the summer I dreamed of. 

Evocative of the serenity empty days propose but never totally fulfil, the morning sun I want to lie in with a cup of black coffee, the sea I want to swim in and the salty skin drying in the heat, open windows onto shouts of street vendors and that smell of warm petrol air that only exists in mediterranean cities. 

Each day I create a fantasy that revolves around these improbable hopes, in a time before corona when the world felt deceptively ordered. I've got lost looking at Eurostar tickets and making calendars marking all the movements of my friends in some attempt to create plans that I know should really be left alone. It's a perplexing dichotomy, between shattering statistics and graphs and death tolls, slurs of 'R' related jargon and calls for economic foundations to soften the already pernicious blow, and mindless, reckless drunkness in beer gardens and crowded rooms, a discourse moving on as though it is already tired of this ceaseless pandemic. Somehow, I feel 'all men are liars' really epitomises the world right now. 

In all honesty, I vacillate between the two. I know the seriousness, feel blindsided, condemn the slow response and too-rapid relaxation. But I am also bored, dream of the summer I selfishly convinced myself I 'deserved', as if my privilege could somehow ward off the virus. I've grieved for a life I left behind, which was so good I perhaps know it wasn't real and couldn't last, and sometimes convince myself that tomorrow I will awake and this will have been an apocalyptic, cold-sweated dream forged to remind me to live a little harder. But, echoing something I think Alain de Botton said, why did I think we could avoid this? That we had overcome nature, and could never succumb to its innate powers. 

Instead, this is the world and the times we are living in. Adapting to the lessons it is teaching us and hopefully listening to the calls for human softness on the natural kingdom. I don't think an existence in this hopeful summer is wrong or futile. It gives me promise for the future, makes me evaluate the things of importance, perhaps create a bucket list for post-corona days. 

I'll try and recreate the warmth and serenity of these pictures, somehow. In my morning coffee under my duvet, in walks in the damp drizzle that still feel somehow releasing, in smaller adventures that appease the hunger for newness. I've rearranged my room, stuck anything remotely orange or peach up on my walls and have taken to sleeping exclusively with the window open. I've found some excitement in bought coffees, the hour of cereal eating and book reading that I savour each morning, and the excessive number of silver rings I have collected.

Trying not to think of what the summer of my twenties should look like, you know?

(sources of pics: all found here)