It is a June unlike any other. It is a June that does not remind me of Junes from long ago. There is a happy haze in my memory and a pep in my step. Now that there is a space in my heart, an empty little lot ripe for me to break ground and start building onto it, I look around and search for inspiration. Should I build a little library to retreat to, to escape into, with a rocking chair, a light blanket on top of it, near the glass window, facing the streets crowded by every person I’ve been before?
Or should I build a small cottage instead? With space for one but room for more. Should I invite someone over to dinner and cook for them, only for us to sit on the wooden porch, staring at the sky at the peak of dusk, cups of coffee in our hands as the air softly turns to a chill? Or should I build a skyscraper, a large building towering over everything else in my heart? Should I take the penthouse suite and never come down, living forever with the sky as my neighbourhood?
I think of all this as my friends and I share a hearty laugh over a drink too many and some dinner we barely get to, lost in the depth of our drunken delirium of decadent laughter. It is Saturday evening still, I think as I sit on the white, wooden railing, talking about nothing in particular but also language, and the world, and love and people and business and art and the future. I think of the future as we talk about it in a thousand different ways. I think of the past. I think of June. In this pocket of paradise, away from the city I hold so dear, I think of happiness. The ordinariness of this moment, the banal beauty, makes me happy in ways I could not have imagined.
The sun sets, and we sit there with beers in our hands and grazed knees after playing in the open fields to our hearts’ content. I tell myself there will be another day; as long as there is some space and another day, it will all be okay. As I lean into the moment, I slowly wander to the lot in the centre of my heart. I decide against building anything; I drop a few seeds.
In a few years, I will look back at this June; it will be the only June I remember. I will read my books under the shade of a tree, and all will be okay.