Caffe Interactions

There is a feeling that floods over me when the summer season starts coming to an end. During the last days of August and September, I start experiencing the end of summer as if somehow life was also coming to an end. 
If I think about it, could be an emotion inherited from my adolescence, back when I was in high school and even from my first years in college. As summer started leaving our days, so did our feeling of being free, of the endless possibilities of what life could be and the uncertain adventures to come.

The relationship between summer and freedom is a happy marriage, almost like no other for me. 
During those years, the warm season was the time when we had an undisputed consent to leave home in the morning, without having the slightest idea on how to answer mom or dad’s question of “What time are you coming back?”.We would merely reply with an “Idk, ‘cause after the club/beach we might blablabla…”, and the only discernible closing to that sentence was the sound of the door being shut.
Summer represented the pinnacle of happy carefree teenage freedom—a set of words that rarely align outside of this context, let alone during that phase of life.

During the season we would go to sleep each night with a vague idea of the next day’s possibilities, but never knowing its development or end. It was the adventure of the present continuous at its peak magnificence. Waking up, eating fruits with plenty juice, flavor and color, light clothes, few decisions to make and also little to take -just remembering to pack an extra pair of underwear, in case the last swim was late at night. The call of a friend to give rise to the first plan of the day and, with it, the beginning of the adventure. Leaving home with no other task than to have fun and meet friends. To indulge in the ritual of being surrounded by them, perhaps catching a glimpse of the current love in our peripheral vision, almost by accident… kind of a fleeting luxury 😉.

As I recall this, I think that the unawareness of the day to come and the summer as a whole, was the key to freedom. Not knowing and not wishing to know; simply wanting to live. A thirst for life and an abundance of it, all intertwined and completely healthy. There was no room for anything to be in vain; rather, living for the sake of living, embracing the experiences to be had, was both the primary and ultimate goal of summer. To live without restraint and never in vain.

So, as weeks went by, February arrived -at that time, in the southern hemisphere-. And, as the month progressed, that flavor of life coming to an end began to grow. Whats worse, February is the shortest month of the year! After Carnival, the ghosts of schedules, school, the concept of homework, temperature dropping, routines and having to return home before dinner (and even earlier, to have a shower), were already perceived. All that list and its ballast increased the bitterness of saying goodbye to summer and, with it, to freedom and life. 

It’s been more than a decade since I finished school and also more than a decade since I finished college. Now, in fact, I live in the northern hemisphere and had to negotiate the exchange of seasons and months, as part of my adaptation. However, even though I gained hours of summer, the last days of August and September arrive and with them, the feeling of the imminent end of life. Something begins to be taken away from us as the heat withdraws from the environment, the bodies and the daily agenda. 

Can we truly feel nostalgia while anticipating? Yes, of course we can. And that’s exactly what I mean if I have to describe the sudden feeling that starts to grow, at the end of summer. It is a nostalgia that is stirred up by the memory of the lost freedom, to which we resigned ourselves to year after year, with the conclusion of the season.
The loss of that freedom is a feeling so profound that -although it may seem like hyperbole, could be one of the underlying reasons why so many adults live chasing summers throughout the year, nowadays. Jumping between hemispheres, longing for the sun and that famed freedom of adolescent immortality.