There are two types of heat in the world: the heat that nourishes and the heat that exposes. For eighteen years, summer was my season of nourishment. It meant the smell of your coffee mingling with sea salt, the rhythm of your breathing as we watched lightning bugs stitch the dusk together, and the immutable fact that you were on the porch swing with a paperback in your lap. But the summer you left—the summer the calendar kept turning despite the fact that my world had stopped—the heat became a spotlight. It illuminated every empty chair, every silent hallway, every hour that stretched like taffy until it snapped.
I did not cry when I packed the boxes. I had run out of tears sometime in the second week of August, during a thunderstorm that knocked out the power and left me sitting in the dark, listening to the rain hammer the roof, thinking: This is the sound of the world washing itself clean, and I am still here. the summer without you
I named him Proust, because he made me remember things involuntarily. There are two types of heat in the