Summerfling
Sophie had grown skeptical about love, such an elusive entity, one she wasn’t sure even existed. She’d heard about it plenty; some people never shut up about it. But whenever she tried to capture it for herself, it always escaped her. Everyone said she was trying too hard. You couldn’t force it or will it into being, it was just supposed to happen, usually when you weren’t expecting it, usually when you stopped looking for it. But that hadn’t worked, either. Nothing in life ever just happened. Nothing worthwhile, anyway. You always had to work for the good stuff.
But then, just as they said, it did happen, when she had just about given up entirely. As sure as the melting snow, the lengthening of days, the return of the robins to their messy little nests, Spring swept in with the promise of something new. It arrived in the breath of a tropical breeze, sun-kissed highlights, and orange citrus scent. Sophie sat in the park outside her office on the first warm day suggesting Summer, eating her lunch on a blanket in the grassy knoll and hoping to clear her head of the abysmal daily grind. The wind rustled through the leaves of the trees, and she looked up from her avocado on toast, her vegetable soup, and there was Jack.
Jack was a typhoon, a churning burst of energy and light that floated by untethered. No. Not floating; he was falling, attempting to catch an errant Frisbee. “I got it, I got it!” he called out, shifting, shifting, and then finally making the grab for the battered orange disc, unaware of the unsuspecting Sophie right in the way.
In the blink of an eye, she had spilled half of her soup on the man suddenly in her lap where her sandwich used to be. Fleetingly, Sophie was furious, but as soon as Jack started to laugh, Sophie laughed, too, shaken by the absurdity of the situation.
“I’m so sorry.” Jack scrambled to his feet, brushing crumbs off his shorts, holding out his soup-dampened shirt. “Looks like lunch is on me. Let me make it up to you.”
Sophie thought he was joking, accepting the apology with a chorus of, “No, it’s fine, it’s okay, really.”
But Jack was adamant, not allowing Sophie to leave until arrangements for retribution had been made. Sophie allowed it only because she didn’t have time to argue; a quick glance at her watch told her she needed to head back to work. But a curious churning grew in her stomach as she rode the elevator up to her floor, not gnawing hunger from her interrupted lunch, but something else. The feeling grew worse as their Saturday lunch loomed closer. Was it anticipation, or had she simply caught a springtime bug? Could it be excitement or was it just indigestion?
During that first lunch, Jack was able to unravel all of Sophie’s tightly held reservations with the ease of his smile. She couldn’t remember the last time she could talk so openly with another person or when someone’s company was so pleasant. Jack oozed summertime sweetness, melting away Sophie’s naturally cold disposition. She worried that their personalities would eventually start to clash, but they complemented each other and Sophie was enthralled by their differences, among many other things.
The blossoming of Spring mirrored their relationship, smoothing out into something comfortable and lazy by the heat of Summer. But Summer eventually faded, too, and the new feeling in Sophie’s stomach was unpleasant and empty. No more warm light slipping through her windows, no more spilled watercolor landscapes of the setting sun. The song of laughter and lawnmowers and ice cream trucks was coming to its end, no more charcoal in the air or sweat on the glasses of late afternoon beer. Even with everything that made Summer so sweet and succulent, shucking corn and that first juicy bite of watermelon, what she missed most was how the sun kissed Jack’s cheeks, making his freckles pop out like stars across the sky, how everything made him sleepy, and how they’d cuddle together despite the damp, humid stickiness of their bodies.
Fall was not without its merits, though, casting everything in bronze and gold, the same shades of Jack’s wild curly hair. Sophie tried to hold on as the weather began to cool, as crisp Autumn marched relentlessly toward an unforgiving Winter, but no matter how tightly she gripped, the ice crept up and spread, blanketing the world in soft angel dust. Jack turned as cold as the bitter air, restless with the endless lack of color. Nothing seemed to make him laugh anymore; he drifted away when Sophie reached out. White on the ground, white in the sky. White, white, white. Jack said it made him feel crazy, so he escaped to warmer climates, tropical, distant, alone.
Just like that, as swiftly as he’d come in, Jack was gone, taking Summer with him, as well as the person Sophie thought she’d met that bright and sunny day. Sophie had taken that first bite of love, but all that remained was an odious, bitter aftertaste. When the weather started to warm again, she’d catch the faint scent of oranges or hear the giggling of strangers tossing Frisbee in the field beside her office, and her stomach would churn with nauseating distaste. Fair-weather, fickle love that fled at the first brush of cold. She no longer questioned the existence of love but sometimes felt that she preferred her previous oblivion.
Until a whiff of coconut oil and a lightly strummed guitar turned her head. She dropped a few coins into the busker’s hat when she got up, returning to work, back to the grind, and he smiled at her. It made her shiver despite the sweat clinging to her back, and the door that love had just tightly closed cracked slightly open again, letting in that same summer breeze that invaded all her sense and reason. She hesitated, and then she smiled and asked the singer for the name of his song.
