/summer. farewell

Well to be honest I was going to write another short story tonight but after reading Kim's recap of the summer I don't really feel like it anymore. I no longer feel the need to vent minor things, so I will put a metaphorical plaster over my skinned and bruised knuckle, and move on. I will not change the way I think nor will I take the immature route of receding back into an emotional mess over small things that perhaps do not go my way in my head. I will not oversensationalise my problems or exaggerate emotions that almost do not exist in an effort to make myself more interesting, not even to others, but to myself. It seems rather pointless at this point in time :) There are bigger things to concern myself with.

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Well, summer is almost over. The three months that at first seemed boundless are finally coming to an end. Boredom has been replaced by nervous anticipation for the start of uni, and expectations of USA uni offers is just about killing me but hopefully with uni full time, time will go faster.

The end of my summer is usually my least favourite time of the year. Actually when I was younger, I liked to say that my favourite season was Autumn to seem different to everyone else (who at that point liked summer the most because it meant long holidays). I convinced myself that Autumn had a beauty that other seasons didn't, but let's face it, in New Zealand Autumn is pretty shitty. It is damp and the temperature drops and the days get shorter and we lose an hour on daylight savings.

I never liked winter because the days are so short and it gets dark so early and I feel like I have achieved nothing all day, as well as the lack of sun and minor SAD. It is also the middle of the year and I get a case of "mid year crisis" where I have gone through 6 months and feel like I have achieved nothing and get stressed out due to exams and get feelings of bleakness due to the huge gap between then and the long summer holidays and all that cool stuff. So yeah, I never liked winter.

I quite like Spring now because it marks the end of winter, and I like the hope that earlier sunrises bring and the days slowly get longer and longer. It reminds me that summer is coming. However, Spring also brings with it an inordinate number of wet days and soaked chuck taylors from unexpected rainfall. It also brings with it the wardrobe problem where the 'transition period' makes it incredibly difficult for me to decide on what to wear for the day because my clothes are almost all strictly categorised into 'summer' or 'winter'. I end up wearing a lot of tights and cardigans that I often have to shed due to randomly hot weather.

So, ironically against my childish wants to 'stand out', I have decided that my favourite season is summer. I like the long days, the early sunrises and the late sunsets that make me feel like I have plenty of time to achieve what I want to. I like the sun smiling down on me every morning when I wake up and beaming its happiness down on me all through January. I like being able to sit here on my bed in a t-shirt and shorts and go to sleep with a single layer of blankets and not freeze. I like being able to throw on random combinations of shorts and tshirts every day and not worry about layering and whether or not 5+ items of clothing look good together. I like waking up at 10am and going outside and lying underneath the greenery of the tree on our deck and seeing monarchs dart around the roses, moving my toes past the barrier between the shadow of the upper-storey balcony and gentle licks of sunlit warmth. Yes, summer brings with it a blissful kind of simplicity and plenty of sun that no other season does.

But I have noticed that when I wake up these days, the sun is only just beginning to rise. I have begun to feel momentary chills in the middle of the night moving between me and my blankets, and the hyper-humidity of the last few days has been the precursor to the unpleasant kind of end-of-summer days that are trying so hard to squeeze out all the remaining warmth of the summer sun that it overexerts itself and sweats a bit too much in the process.

Yes, Autumn is coming again, and with it another cycle begins. However, this Autumn and Winter will surely be a different experience to years past. And thus, I look forward to them. I will probably never enjoy them as much as I have now conceded that I enjoy Summer, but a slyly content form of nonchalance is better than contempt, right?

Hmmm... what's your favourite season and why?