Ode to Summer

Drawing things with your hands, outside the car windows, the warm wind touching you like a long-lost lover. Sleeping in my bed, wearing my short-sleeved pyjamas or my favourite t-shirt and my nickers. Sleeping with the windows wide open. Sleeping. Dreaming of warmth. Dreaming of cold. Wearing flip-flops. Forgetting socks on the bottom of winter drawers. Looking up at the stars and finding out that they look bigger than you remember and that they fall and that they take your dreams back to you. Wondering if our faithful departed are up there, besides them. Fearing that there is nothing up there, besides them. Tidying up the toys. Wearing a linen shirt. Showing scars and dressing them with sun-kissed skin. Forgetting about Death. Sporting sunglasses and feeling incredibly good-looking. Dreading rain. Cursing summer storms. Night-swimming in the sea. Knowing that you will overcome this. Getting polluted with your best girlfriend, who, you know, are the sisters you never had. Thinking of them married and with kids one day. Hoping that they will always dream as fearlessly as now, on this lake shores. Waking up in the morning and finding your cotton sheets at the bottom of your bed. Under your bed. Behind your bed. Feeling that your thoughts are widening and that all offices are closed. Wanting nothing. Peaches and zucchini. Having dinner at Varazze harbour. Having no fear of forgetting. Showing your legs. Playing with water under the shower. Saying: “it is really stuffy today”. Celebrating my birthday in Barolo. Playing chess in Apricale. Lying in fields and gazing at the sky. Stopping at the traffic lights and smiling at who is sitting beside you. Thinking that wheat field up there nearby the graveyard looks like a sea. With waves, and all. Staring outside your window and looking at a deer. Sweating a lot. Sweating too much. Forgetting how to turn on the TV. Cycling around an empty city keeping your arms wide open. Putting on red nail varnish on your toes. Being sure that all those heavy sweaters are utterly useless. Being brimming with the most oblivious feelings. Thinking that everything is possible from this balcony. Or impossible. Needing nothing. Needing the most disparate things. Or desperate. Enjoying the shadows. Eating one, 100 ice-creams. Feeling your skin stretching, and being able to show off your suntan at last. Avoiding crazed bats, plastic ice-lollies and sudden lightning. Seeing the tarmac trembling down there in the distance. Feeling life trembling, but growing and winning, from up there. Ode to the Summer, for all this, and so much more.