Summer is halfway over — at least in terms of school semesters. It just now feels like summer. Last night on the balcony at Doc’s the air was stagnant, full, heavy. You looked exhausted. People talked of sad things in the oppressive heat, necks and foreheads glinting with sweat under the harsh lighting. Careers, relationships, academics, what’s not suffering a downturn? Even the pizza burned my tongue. You remain optimistic and I draw from that. There was relief, there was melancholy, there was a general fatigue.

As I drove through the city today, my recollections of both the shimmering snow and the mountains of ice and sludge walling in the parked cars seemed like false memories. Did the snow ever exist? I miss skating in the dark at Schenley. I hear people say that winter is depressing but the summer has been harder for me. In every season though, the city manages to become strangely beautiful. Now green and sultry, it sits in a haze of heat, waiting for the buzz of the cicadas to return. Uncertainty is pervasive.