It feels like I’ve never lived through a summer this hot.
Even sitting quietly in a room, you can feel the heat rising from every direction. The fan spins without rest, but it doesn’t seem to bring even a hint of relief.
On days like this, the only thing that feels necessary is a can of ice-cold beer from the fridge. Pull the tab, hear that sharp hiss, and memories begin to surface all at once.
I once asked Jie why so many memories seem to stay stuck in some summer from the past. He flicked ash into the ashtray and looked as if he were truly thinking about it before answering, “My physics teacher said temperature and molecular motion are directly related. The higher the temperature, the more violently the molecules move.” Then he laughed out loud. A joke that cold couldn’t do anything to cool down the damn weather in early June.
I’ve thought about it seriously too. Even though the city I live in can get bitterly cold, it never snows. The things I go through every winter, the people I say goodbye to, all seem to be sealed away in some frozen drawer. You may not open it often, but when you do, everything is still there, unchanged. Summer, on the other hand, leaves marks everywhere. It burns, but it doesn’t feel warm. Even if you try to hide from it, there will always be a moment when it comes back into view.
Like Murakami once wrote, the beer drunk over a whole summer could fill an entire swimming pool. Every summer, I drink with Jie or Mouse. Not because I’m trying to escape anything, and not because I’m making some deliberate effort to keep a relationship alive. I just treat it as something to do. I even bragged in Jie’s social feed that he still owed me a case of beer. And every time we actually sit down to drink together, I’m the first one to give in. The beers with white foam spilling over the rim, the hotpot place so loud you can’t hear anyone speaking softly, the three of us blushing and laughing at each other as one glass disappears after another.
Sometimes we change locations. After hotpot, we go sing karaoke. In the KTV, we drink and sing at the same time. On the way home late at night, we buy some barbecue and more beer, and after getting back, we keep drinking. Fortunately, none of us are the overly sentimental type. No one has ever gotten drunk and called someone. We just sit on the balcony and let the evening breeze pass over us.
That wasn’t always how it was. The year we graduated from college, at four in the morning, Bin-ge, Xiao Ma, and I were squeezed onto a narrow bed with the air conditioner set to 17 degrees. Bin-ge wanted to call her. Xiao Ma and I kept encouraging him, and in the end he really dialed the number. The girl who had once been his first love sounded a little impatient at first, but she didn’t hang up. Bin-ge talked to her for a long time. He sounded a little wronged when he said, “You don’t care about me anymore? Back then you were the one who made all my decisions. You chose this major for me, and I finished it.” In that pitch-black room, we listened in silence. I still don’t know whether he quietly wiped away tears that night.
Back then, I wanted to hold on to too much love and too much hope for the world. But those things that seemed unreal slowly became a swamp as I kept moving away from them, dragging me down little by little. I struggled in despair. No one came to save me, and I couldn’t save myself either.
I’ve gone through several graduations already: middle school, high school, university, and now this first year of watching other people graduate. Not once did I manage to say a proper goodbye. It was like that year outside the hotpot restaurant, standing on the stairs, when I said, “Let me hug you.” In the end, I still didn’t say what I had really wanted to say.
This year was the same. I had imagined countless times what I would say and what I would do. But the more sincerely I wanted to express something, the more likely it was that I’d fall short of the words. So in the end, I could only write a line on the blackboard in a hurry:
Don’t dwell on the past, don’t fear the future.
I’d seen that sentence many years ago, but this was the first time I’d ever written it myself. Jie asked me if I regretted anything. I said my only regret was not leaving myself a little more time to write those eight words properly.
That is this summer: it has barely begun, yet it already feels like midsummer. At 2:30 in the morning, I still couldn’t sleep. I leaned on the balcony railing. There wasn’t a trace of wind outside, the lights in the distance looked frozen in place, and the whole area was silent.
Mouse had taken off his T-shirt, revealing his smooth belly. He asked me why I wasn’t turning on the air conditioner.
Maybe that’s just what we like to do: turn on heaters in winter and air conditioners in summer, while rarely ever really enjoying the years we already have.