Lost Things

Published in The Apiary, 2020.

Summer was taken from us the way most lost things are. Down the back of the sofa, crushed by the stained cushions your mam turned over to hide the yoghurt stain you left in the wake of your infancy - or perhaps, in most extreme cases, on an icy road on a pitch-black night, with shattered glass as petite diamonds scattered upon the road, and flashing lights which scream against the darkness as a mother left behind by her child. Gone forever.

Summer was meant to be the promise of freedom, of escape, of some sense of spiritual autonomy. Of driving down a carriageway at eleven o'clock at night, soaring at sixty miles an hour, feeling as though if you were to go any faster you, and the radio blaring to the tune of The Killers or Fleetwood Mac or even Girls Aloud, would ascend into some subsequent state of being. Ethereal.

Summer was meant to be laughing with your friends, laughing with Him, whose lips made you blush even after his headlights had cut around the corner and left you to your aching elation. Meant to be lying awake against the unsettled darkness of your room, waiting for the gentle buzz of your phone as though it's a kiss sent just for you. Meant to be grinning as though a life apart from him - from this Summer - was an impossibility, rather than an inevitability. Meant to be.

Jamie Ryan Anderson