Summer Kids in December
Prose poem
We lay down on our cold wooden floor, passing out due to the exhaustion of dealing with the frozen hearts enslaved by the world thrown our way. We are trapped in a dream that marbles misery into addiction, chasing down the head-scratching thoughts in a labyrinth of casualties full of flowers and stones. Bloody footprints on the muddy front porch cannot be enough proof that we made it home. Tiptoeing through the moments where everything is a blank canvas — until chaos ensues, and we burn ourselves up so that people will see the red, yellow, black, and gray splotched amidst the lives gobbled up in white. We always want to believe that winter is our seasonal friend — although the icicles pointed at our eyes are irrefutable signs that we are not welcome and our presence is unwanted. Still, we think we are satisfied enough with taking the chill off our souls through the tear-soaked bodies hidden beneath the silk made up of self-sacrifices and a constant thirst for happiness.
The time has come for the blizzards to knock on our front door, asking eagerly if anybody’s home. We are drawn back to reality with our eyes closed, holding our breath as if it will free us from our regular torment. The snow angels molded by the summer kids have now gotten trampled on with lies. And the scream of kettles indicating the water has boiled in the neighborhood dies away into silence. The creaking sound of the rusty doorknob somehow revives our wildness, and we are more than ready to greet our uninvited guests with rebellious choices. To preserve the little chance to stand our ground before the number of spirits we have left get annihilated again in the living room. Again. Again, like several blood moon nights ago as our last-resort attempts to live were reduced to dull jokes. Now, we step out into the open only to be ambushed by heavy snowfalls — a warning that they’ll soon come again to play house with us.
The crowds often find the summer kids helplessly unhinged. They tell us to dust off every inch of our old memories in the drawer next to our beds — so they won’t get distorted by the cold wave. They have no idea how the past in our heads can look a little bit too threatening at times. They turn a blind eye to how much we wish it would stop breathing down our necks whenever life seems to stop picking on us. But the summer kids are just kids with their sanity pestered by the outgrown weeds on the sidewalks. We are close to giving up on waiting for the love hurricane to pour down heavily–so our roots of youth may experience redemption. Some say our naivety will be the death of us, but what they fail to realize is dead people can never die twice. At least, that’s what the blurry reflections on the crystallized lake in the depth of woods across our secret hideout whispered a few years ago.
We, the summer kids, might have pushed our identities into oblivion the day arctic weather came to behead our isolated dreams. Yet, defying all odds, our feet instinctively carry these mortifying flesh and bones on the path we choose to follow. The know-it-alls keep yelling that the severe frostbite we suffer from during these times is an advance payment for the things we are after. And we get lost in translation because what meaning do regrets have when the winter solstice keeps days of tomorrow at bay? Just like how the frigid air knows no mercy in setting up dreary atmospheres, the summer kids know no understanding about almost anything except chasing colors of the warmth only they can sense. And even if we don’t get to be reborn evergreen, the search for such tenderness that permeates the piercing wind of December will continue — it won’t break off halfway until the wildfire in our veins drifts off to sleep under the heaps of carnation buds.
In December, the summer kids insist on holding onto the edge of the icebound cotton ropes. Regardless of our devastating form in the present, it is sufficient for us to have an idea of how sweet the taste of blooming hopes is — and how patient they are waiting in the corner of an alley where the sunrise will pull us into its finest embrace.
