Text by Ludovica De Gaudenzi
image by Arnaud Ele
Summer;
The time of year where days are longer and the sun is warmer, and that there’s this sense of freedom in the air that tastes like new beginnings and endless possibilities.
It’s like time stops and the world is just an endless limbo; I can feel melancholy clogging my throat and making it harder to breathe, and the sunset tainting everything with its red-pink shade doesn’t manage to cover up the squalor of this skyline.
And it doesn’t matter how cool the drinks and how hot the sand under your bare feet; the light linen dresses floating around your body, the hair dancing around your face, the brown skin, pink lips, white teeth—the empty promises of youth and the regurgitated sadness of a sorrowful generation.
In the silence of the night, under the clear skies filled with thousands of stars, a guitar plays that song everyone knows and uncertain voices sing along to the slow litany of how I wish, how I wish you were here. And it doesn’t matter if we’re all young and beautiful and broken and cursed, it doesn’t matter that our lives have barely begun and that there’s blood rushing through our veins; because here I still am, waiting for you to come back and fill the void in the shape of you; a heartbeat like a lullaby that would sing me to sleep, and arms to protect me from the monsters under my bed, our bodies colliding like the crashing of the waves against the shore.
It’s been many summers now, and I still feel the same.
