73rd Letter: to Summer

Dear friend,

Between wakefulness and sleep, in a blue light of an early morning, a summer storm enters my dreams. Bojím sa búrky a meškajúcich vlakov, I fear storms and delayed trains, I think in Slovak. Thunder echoes in the backyards, sound of rain feels like home, summer nights of past, small town paths washed by rainwater. My mother grows fuchsias on the kitchen window pane, purple and red like bruises on my knees in the peak of a summer long gone.

As you write letters to spring, I always have been writing them to summer.

Eight years ago I wrote: Summer brings hot concrete, bare knees, and mulberry sorrow. In the studio, a fan blows on my neck, I pull down the blinds, slip off my sneakers under the table. In the evening, I sink into chlorinated water, melt into the sunset, rub sunscreen onto my shoulders. In metro, my hair is still wet and my face, lit by the screen, resembles the colour of pale skin underwater. Inhale, exhale, and the screams of children from the next pool bounce off the tiles like a ping-pong ball, underwater the sound is hollow and deep, in the screen's glow the skin loses its colour. Our street burns white-hot, and the Ukrainian workers between the traffic cones wear no shirts under their reflective vests. I think of the rivers. Váh and the Danube. This year I’ll miss elderflower syrup, the solstice, and the ripening of cherries.

Back then, I did not know yet that I will miss the ripening of cherries again and again and again, that I will stop writing in my mother tongue. I did not know that I will spend years growing the love I was just slowly falling into, at the time fearing attachments and predictable story lines in the blossom of youth. I did not know I will grow and become an urban woman. That I will soften inside out, stop fearing vulnerability, that gods of the city, harsh and brutal to many, will treat me with gentle love after accepting my sacrifice of ripening cherries and fuchsias on my mother’s window pane. You remember, last time I was not sure what was my offering to gods of Berlin, I thought it was 7 years of youth and storylines I did not choose, but in the end, now I know, it’s the ripening of cherries.

My spring was interrupted by a series of colds and sore throats to later find out that I have low vitamin D levels. The sacrifice of the sunshine, in the screen's glow the skin loses its colour and skies of long Berlin’s winter take its last warm undertone.

I travel to Slovakia to celebrate the birthday of my best friend. The Eurocity Express is weaving itself alongside the Elbe, the rocks, the forest, the hundred towers of Prague, the forest again. I arrive in Bratislava before midnight, the air is fresh, maybe too fresh for an early summer night. I sleep on an inflatable mattress and wake up into the sunshine. Before bringing the long table outside and placing glass vases with soft pink peonies on a white table cloth, we go for a wedding dress fit check. It feels surreal, as we agreed on being each others’ maids of honour when we were thirteen, I look at my friend in white soft fabrics and getting just taste of Slovak summer I return back to Berlin.

I’m applying for a German passport, in the simple written part of the language exam I write an email to a fictional friend who asked me to take care of their cat during summer holiday. I need to find out more details, exact dates, find out if I can do it, does fictional me have cat allergy or am I going to be out of town for a whole month of August? Will I take care of the fictional cat? Am I a good friend with the fictional cat’s fictional owner? I decide to leave it open but hint that I might be traveling and I need to know more about the cat’s needs, how many times a day I should feed her? I neither agreed, nor disagreed with this fictional favour. I made sure to include sentence structures complicated enough to grand me a success, neither/nor, even though, if/then, despite that.

Despite everything, days are still leaning closer to the sun.

I spend time with my non-fictional friends, the true gifts of the gods of the city.

The last friends leave our living room after 3 am, we start the dishwasher, it hums silently trough the night, we collect empty bottles in the kitchen corner, pack leftovers in glass containers, stacked them in the fridge. Quiches, hummus, and a rhubarb cake, I bake once a year, always on June 7th.

At some point the joy of late nights, once an unspectacular, perhaps unhealthy habit, turned into something we have to keep alive and nourish. To protect in the days of early morning commutes, careers, meetings, second shifts, daycare pickups, fluffs of dusts illuminated on the floor.

I protect the late nights and the dust fluffs, I keep them alive. I nourish the aimless days. The city is heating up, as every year, I wish I could take a delayed train on the verge of summer storm, to go cherrypicking.

As a young girl walking the dusty paths on the outskirts of the town alongside sunflower fields, in the dusk of slow and sticky summer days, being in euphoric love or love sick, sometimes both, when my first love gave me The Beatles CD I already had, and then we broke up crying in a park, when two months of summer break could fit two lifetimes, at that time, I used to plot plans how to travel the world, how to move, to move to some city, abroad. I was dreaming of becoming an artist, or maybe a writer, maybe a painter, maybe a journalist.

I did not know that longing will always persist, that it will change its form, might switch around, that the boredom of dusty paths and outskirts could become something to desire. Cherries, fuchsias, summer itself or summer somewhere else, chapters we wish to began, the one with a new passport or with old friends, storylines we did not, or could not, choose. Despite that, longing does not exclude round days pierced with moments of joy, the fullness.

June 8th, between night and day, in a blue light of an early morning a summer storm enters my dreams. Home still smells like a rhubarb cake.

With Love,
Barbora