A summer's tale: the best songs of 2015 30-21

Remember when we walked the streets past houses with wrought iron fences and dog statues, and we held hands until they got kind of clammy, and then we’d both accuse the other person of having sweaty hands, but it was neither one of us really. It was just summer. (And this is just how I felt every time I walked into a room without you).

 

Summer’s gone, like light draining from the sky, but I still remember all the things we did. Like at the beginning when we rolled down the windows and sang songs like this ballad.

One afternoon, we dragged a blanket into the garden and read each other poems, and I ran my hand through your hair, and you smiled at me, and then I looked up at all that blue sky, at the branches of the tree that gave us shade overhead.

Remember that time we sat on the bus, and this song came on, and we put an ear bud in each other’s ears because we wanted to share it and also because there is nothing quite so sweet as looking at two people sharing music.

  

One day we drove up into the hills and talked all afternoon about our parents and our childhoods. We talked about the people we thought we'd be and the people we'd once been. 

And sometimes even the summer can break your heart. Sometimes you make a date with the night, the wind cooling your skin, and you remember all the nights past, or enough of them to try and construct some meaning in your life, wondering why tonight you're alone, sitting at the edge of the reservoir, looking out over all that water and wanting it to mean something, anything. 

One morning we drove down to the water to watch the minnows wriggle and the striders slip across it like a pane of glass. You told me about a time when you were fourteen and you saw an angel. It was your cousin smiling down at you from heaven. And for a while, we were quiet and we thought about the thin veil between this life and the next, about the wooden prow of a boat  parting waters like a veil. 

 One afternoon we drove two states and sat in the car with the windows rolled up, and felt the sweat pouring off our bodies, just to remind ourselves mid-winter, that once there had been summer.




 And towards the end of summer when the cone flowers and black-eyed Susans were dried husks, we walked through parched streets, into thin films of light, stood outside of bars, passing time, passing cigarettes, waiting on time to pass. And then the light caught your eyes.



Because when you get down to it, we're all, basically human. And all that I mean is that sometimes we get drunk, or say things we don't mean, or the summer ends and someone moves back to France, or the summer ends and nothing changes, or the summer ends and we visit a bar at the end of a long dirt road and tell each other stories about all the places we've been, all the things we've done.