It Is Summer

it's been a while since i wrote this, and i didn't have the nerve to post it until now. i'm still not sure, but here goes...........


It is summer.

Winter has passed. No-one noticed spring – whether it came and went, or was overtaken on the race to this country by the summer waves of heat and decided to go back home is none of our concern. All we know is that our country is hot again. Our hot, sultry, humid, exotic, passionate, frustrated, wonderful, beautiful country.

I am sitting here alone on the roof of our house. I came home alone, and instead of going to my room, I stayed talking with my friends, until everyone went home and I came up here .I used to do this much more two or three years ago. When I was thirteen years old, and as I recall, very depressed with myself and my life, it was almost an addiction with me to come up here and look at the sky and untangle my thoughts in a way that didn’t make my sanity seem redundant.

The sky fascinated me. I stared at it, sometimes for the better part of an hour, at the patterns of sunlight on clouds, at the rising of the sun behind a cotton blanket of morning clouds that looked like they guarded the horizon of the ocean at the end of the world. The stars were always my favorite part of any view of the sky. I’ve sneaked up to the roof at two in the morning, four am before dawn, the stroke of midnight, in time for sunset, late evening, even high noon – I could probably find my way up there with my hands tied behind my back and blindfolded. Sometimes it would be like distant tiny sparkling gemstones lying scattered across the mindbendingly vast dome that is the sky. Sometimes there would be just a few strong constant points of diamond light shining through the enormous skies of the plains, turned a brooding yet serene purple for the night, bringing an anticipatory shudder of response to the promise of rain in one’s spine. Delicious, dangerous yet welcome thrill of the prospect of a storm, perhaps a chill breeze, the smell of wet earth and the salt bracken of the marshlands further inland. That is the heaven of our country, the bliss of the cities of the green plains of the east.

I never thought that the stars were my friends or that the moon had a person living inside it. I knew perfectly well that the stars were immense fireballs shining across unimaginable lengths of distance and time. On clear nights, as a child I remember seeing the craters on the face of the moon through the lattice veil of the leaves of the huge trees on either side of the quiet lanes near my home. I still think that the moon looks like an ancient ruin hanging in the sky, a legacy of an ancestral race that lived when the moon was still a part of us.

The greatness of the sky, the distance and beauty of the moon and the stars has never made me feel “small” or “insignificant”. Always, always, I have felt as though I was a part of that glory. I remember with reasonable clarity at least three occasions when this happened to an unusual extent.

Once it was late evening, and a cool summer breeze made me lift up my face, and the sky was sparkling like a tiara with countless stars.

Once it was sunset, and the blood-orange light of the sun struck and fell away from massively banked clouds across the entire sky.

Once it was the time of the approaching monsoon, and the heavy, massive, steel, almost black clouds appeared to be closing in on the horizon around the edges of the world.

On each occasion I could close my eyes and suddenly my mind was swirling with some unnameable primeval feeling, and I felt that I could be at the centre of it all, like the siphon at the eye of a hurricane. It was an exhilarating, terrible, slightly frightening, empowering and heartbreakingly sad moment each time. Tonight is the first time I have ever written of it.

So many beautiful times on this roof. So many thoughts resolved, feelings decided, doubts cleared, situations thought out, conversations held. So many memories. Sad, enigmatic, doubtful, deeply important to me as a person, as a human being with a soul at the core of me.

I intended to write about only tonight. But I knew as soon as I brought my pen to paper that I must make a record of all I owe to this place. All the gratitude I feel to the sky for being so beautiful, powerful, strong, imposing, arrogant in its immensity, so much a part of me. Memories I must record for my own sake.

And now I come to tonight. A beautiful breeze, the heat is not enough yet to make one gasp for breath, as it will be later, but still the wind blowing my soft hair across my face is very welcome. The moon is full, colored a dull red, the craters visible, looking like an ancient temple of beautiful white skystone behind the red tinted ragged curtains of clouds fringing it. The sky is that serene, gloomy tint of purple that I love so much. So beautiful, all of it; so painful, the pull of unbearably desperate longing inside me.

I can hardly stop to breathe in my hurry to write, afraid that if I stop then these feelings will leave me for good this time and I will never be able to recapture this soul-filling exultation in my core again, much less put it in words.

The sky is overcast now. The breeze has died, almost. My hands hurt from balancing myself to write for so long. But I am finished recording my secret life as a skygazing dreamer (how clichéd it seems to say this – until it is true for one) for now, that is. The music in my ear has become intrusive. I am done writing for tonight.

Summer is here.





Trisha Ray
23/3/2008