Late Summer

A group of people gathered around a campfire on a starry night

Late Summer was a finalist for the Queer Adventurers 2022 essay contest. We are so excited to feature this piece by Sam Moe!

You wake up alone, storm a circle outside your window, youโ€™ve been dreaming about sheets of mushrooms again. Itโ€™s best to nap through, wrap yourself in the sleeping bag your mother got you, coated in paint when you wanted to be an artist, you thought youโ€™d make it, dragging hands across your clothes, coating fingers in acrylics then smearing blue across the workshop floor, no one understood your mirror-collage pieces, you were collapsing on the Greenline, returning to school even though no one could stand you, you werenโ€™t cool but you miss it now.

*

Itโ€™s a navy-gray afternoon. Take what little furniture you have, and drag it into the living room. The bed stays in the bedroom, it doesnโ€™t need to loom like a god or a threat, not like those days, when you had no money but what else was new. You let her in and she said your life was crumbling. You woke up on the floor, the air had escaped, you spent your last twenty dollars on another blow-up mattress, biding time until your mother bought you a bed without a frame, still, you sleep well, no box spring but what does it matter. The dining room table is a bookshelf. Ice-blue chairs for bedside tables. Youโ€™re sleeping again.

*

Youโ€™re not afraid of nighttime but you canโ€™t breathe, the doctor told you everything was fine, maybe one night your heart will crawl out of its shell into another body or a rum barrel, wherever it can reach, a holding space for such a thing. Have you finished your work? Have you emailed your mom? Have you let the world know youโ€™re alive today? No, but you hung lights in the living room, you ate the rest of the cheese in the fridge, and that must count for something.

*

So your heart wears away, a corroded space. You are so empty someone could shake your body and hear bones as keys. You are restless. You take your papers and pens, journals and books, spread them across kitchen counters and doodle as you make a sandwich, staining pages with bursts of smoothie fruit, soon your kitchen will baptize you, meaning you will be washed new by the light of the fridge but isnโ€™t this healing, you wonโ€™t be able to stop eating out of the crisper drawer but donโ€™t they call that appetite, youโ€™re devoted, youโ€™re done rummaging, meaning you take her love and press it into the bottom of a pie, let it crust amongst cinnamon, cloves, and too-soft apples. She tried to figure you out and you gave her puzzles, boxes of numbers, a journal covered in spills and Glenlivet. There is sandstone dust, water meal you gathered with your hands, are you going to make it through the night?

*

You arrive home at dusk, wearing a coat of mothballs and dreams, hoping your fears donโ€™t escape your body and twist into stone. There is a lake you almost trip into, there is an animal on the periphery, everyone drinks, everyone plays with lantern fire. With the promise of coneflower cookies and glossy echinacea you come, half-hidden in deep honey rooms, these kitchens are too open for sobbing, you long for ice and rain, for storms to touch ground, lightning to unravel your hair. You could turn beautiful, believable. You could impersonate clouds and move with others when they laugh and speak. 

Beyond, there is laughter. Around the corner, there are children running. Someone trips down the patio steps, someone keeps handing you plates, someone points out how youโ€™re unwell these days.

A grassy meadow and a lake in late summer with dramatic clouds overhead

You keep busy walking rings around the yard. You recognize water hyacinth, pondweed, cattails, the man  who catches then frees turtles. You go home and wash too-soft strawberries in the sink and think, your imagined version of her would laugh, would have leaned against the space between the counter and the book stacks, willing you to keep living, never strong enough to tell you to keep going after the disappearance, the extinction of your strength, your strawflower jacket and marigold soul. In her lungs you heard rainfall, echoes on the other side of the bedroom door, you thought love died on the balcony but it rests here, among the fires and the pond.

author bio: Sam Moe is the first-place winner of Invisible Cityโ€™s Blurred Genres contest in 2022, and the 2021 recipient of an Author Fellowship from Marthaโ€™s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her first chapbook, โ€œHeart Weeds,โ€ is out from Alien Buddha Press and her second chapbook, โ€œGrief Birds,โ€ is forthcoming from Bullshit Lit in April 2023. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @SamAnneMoe.


Read other finalists!

My First Swimming Lesson – Michael Ogah

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Queer Adventurers accepts essays from LGBTQ writers during our annual contest. We accept guest posts year round. Join the mailing list to be notified of the essay contest deadlines and theme, and to keep up with the latest gay and lesbian travel news