Sweet summer, fear not

Today as I was walking to work, I saw a couple kissing. They were in a car, she dropping him off for work at the Maritime Center. I was walking up the street and caught them in the act. They were leaning in together making it last, a really nice goodbye kiss, the sun shining on them through the windshield. The kind of kiss the researcher would have marked as among the 124 (see my post titled the art of kissing and https://www.seeker.com/kissings-long-history-a-timeline-1767196852.html . )
Anyway it was a nice sight for sore eyes. I was close to the man when he got out of the car and wanted to say to him, "that's how its done, spread that love to her". But I just smiled and walked on to work. Again never saying what I really want to, fear holding me back.

I see a lot of couples, a lot. It's like when you get a hair cut or want a certain one and you see it everywhere, or you buy a new car and all of a sudden you notice them all over the road when you hadn't before. This is called the frequency illusion or the baader-meinhof-phenomenon. Now you are going to run into that name again soon guaranteed, like a literary version of a earworm. Anyhoo, so I see them everywhere, I sit on my balcony and couples walk by all the time holding hands, some talking, others not. Invading my single life like a deep cut when you step on a clam shell sticking up from the warm sandy beach and it slices your instep to shreds. Yeah like that. Summer is hard, and it has been hard since Terry died. It's when I get frightened. Weird I know, but it's my scary season now. Because life is in your face. You can't hide behind the drawn drapes and in the warm blankets on the couch in the dark at 6pm. You need to get out and cool off in public, encounter other humans doing their business, like kissing and holding hands and going for that fucking walk I used to with my guy.

When I was really young before I met Terry I remember a few trysts with guys, Timmy Derbashire in the park, David ?  down by the lake making out and never wanting the warm nights to end. I felt so alive in summer, so part of the world and at one with everything. Any wonder it scares me now. It's constant in-your-face aliveness. Maybe it is more about middle age and not wanting life to end, not wanting to become my old boring parents whom I felt so sorry for when I was young and running out the door for fun as they stayed in their house watching TV. Maybe it is about fear I am missing out on something.

But I think it is aptly titled this frequency illusion.  It is an illusion, couples are not everywhere and hey they might not even be happy and contented - contented like I sometimes feel as a uncoupled women. Maybe there are many many more lonelier than me people all around me, single frightened and yearning for the good old summer days just like me. I could start thinking of them and see them everywhere too. It's all what lens you want to look through, it's all the glasses you put on, the mindset you convince yourself to have on any given day. There is no magic, no conspiracy, no winter of your discontent to hide into, no summer to fear. There is only you and what you make of each day you have left.

So I am sitting outside on my deck in this warm summer like spring night with the most gorgeous sunset right now and I want to go grab my camera and capture it, the clouds are swirly and a darkish grey with white tips. The sun behind them makes the clouds glow a reddish orange especially the ones low on the horizon as they look like mountains and the sun has underlit the ones above it's setting into a dark red. Some clouds look like stream rising and are wind patterned, the whole sky turning from pale orange to dark red and violet, a real light show, it's stunning. I am fighting the urge to capture it and put the picture in this post. Instead I am letting it be there, enjoying it, just for me, no need to share, no need to try to hold on, just watch it and let the sweet summer feel of this night envelop me. It is a sunset you are experiencing and it is grand. Fear not singleton.

But damn the photographer in me is having a hissy fit.