There is something about June and June skies that causes me to feel a sense of loss, something ephemeral and soft and melancholic tucked in my soul that I cannot get back or shake or erase.

I think it reminds me primordially of the school calendar of my childhood and the beginning of summer and the joy that that carried and the freedom that that held and promised and entailed, and now no longer carries or holds. In June we all were released from school — on whatever date, different according to the grade, but all in June. Summer lay before us distended in the heat of the grass and the sunny languor of the piazza, first to play with pots and pans and read in the pear tree and chase sweaty in the streets, and later well into the night, later, when we were older, kissing, or naked in the cars of boys we thought we loved, and indeed, we did love.

June was the gong of freedom–promised, and that I earned, as demanded of me.

And then later on, after I had misguidedly left my place, June ushered in — however it was to happen but it was going to happen — a return home to that place of my soul: my family, the countryside that sang to me, the pear tree, the boys, the fields of wheat ripe yet not malt, the crickets in the fields not lazy but punctual. The particular terse blue, not yet deep August-like but light cobalt a step passed the coolness of May. The breeze of the evening, the everlasting daylight. A time of the year when I knew I could go and be there for long enough to soothe my soul, to appease me for another round of the absurdity I signed up for along the way. The absurdity that took me away from my center of gravity. I counted the days.

Now every day in June when I look at a calendar and the sky I expect something to happen, auspicious. I stare at the date on the page or the screen thinking I must have forgotten something important — something I was expecting. Surely this was the time for it to happen, this something hopeful and wonderful and pregnant of possibility. Flowers, love, home, love. I smell it in the air laden with fragrance and I hear the sounds — the birds and the crickets and the tree frogs in heat. I see it in the sky, in the hue of pink and blue in the west that I imagine looking exactly the way I know it looks right now above my mountain, or at the entrance to the piazza, the glow suspended over the hill eternal. The most sublime normal thing I could be used to.

And indeed my heart is still expecting something good to come in June: reunion. Departure. Arrival. Freedom. The beginning of a new season, of change: the hope that a new season once held within its flowery branches. June, the passage from duty to release. From promise to blooming. From restraint to exhale. From warmth to heat.

But aside from a few birthdays, nothing comes now. In the life of people used to mark their childhood on the calendar of the seasons, it no longer is. It is all the same. It is a portent that no longer brings. Adulthood is such; and I feel mine more so than ever.

And yet I continue to look for it, what may come.

Let it bring, please; let it come.