I make a piping hot cup of coffee to start the day. The first sip burns my tongue. I do not mind. The pleasures of living with the heart open at its widest were too many to count, but the start of each day, the same repetitive brewing of coffee and the routine burning of your tongue, was always a crucial detail, protruding and noticeable. The storms and the mugginess of July, the memory of deluges past, have not managed to shake my ground. My heart is open to all possibilities: if it must rain, who am I to have an opinion about it?
With July, hope comes over and over, storm after storm. All our sorrows are washed away in the hope of something better. To have things to look forward to while having your feet rooted in the present was the only way to live. No longer am I lost in the imagination of the future; the future is here, and I am on the periphery of it. All my stories have faded; if there ever was a time to write new ones, to blaze new trails and find new paths to everything that is yet to happen, it is now. The rains of July have shrouded everything that has happened before. I can see little when I look behind; the future seems like a medley of colours.
More of what will be crucial to me is yet to arrive than what has already. Most of what will happen to me is yet to happen. But most importantly, most good I am yet to do is still in my hands. If the year was a coffee shop and the months tables, July reminds me of my favourite table in another city a long time ago. July is the table hidden behind the pillar. It is the quiet corner in plain sight. In July, we rewrite. Beneath the unexpected showers, a quiescent corner of comfort says:
Rest a little; you have walked too far and braved the tenacious tempests of time, and what a splendid job you have done with all you could do. Come the last legs of the year, you will need new stories; July is when you begin writing them.