Summer arrived a month ago with blue skies and clean breezes. It's a cause for celebration.  Nights spent on the tar roof drinking beer, encircled by the faint fire fly glow of christmas lights.  The city is a distant presence on the skyline residing over us like a constellation.  We've bought lawn chairs with cup holders in their fabric arms that we sit on while musing over small thoughts and ghost stories.  There is no fence on the edge of the roof because it is not meant for entertaining but the danger adds an element of novelty and thrill.  

I've moved out of my parents house to a three-story apartment building in Park Slope.  It's a new freedom.  I have my own neighborhood.  I have my own neighbors. I have my own apartment (which I share with two roommates) and most importantly I have my own room.  Now I sit in my new room and write with the help of a few sips of whiskey and old tunes blasting through my speakers.  The day is beautiful outside but having no where to go to escape my own thoughts, I sit here and I try to write.  I try to recapture my old story telling skills.  My teachers used to say I was good at this.  But why?  Right now it escapes me.  There is no plot that jumps to mind.  Maybe it was too much whiskey, or maybe it was too little.  Better luck later, maybe.

My job is helping people keep promises.  It is a grueling endeavor, at times even torturous and I never feel fulfilled.  I exist in a world outside the waking realm where inner consciousness and dreams reside; where peoples internal tide pushes them to action or inaction.  I have thought of myself at times like the moon, or a mastermind.  I create the roar of the ocean you hear in a conch shell; in essence I am you, but you are not me.  I am the pulse, the motion, the flow, the hope, the fear, the perseverance.  But I am not G-dly, nor am I human.  And do not get me wrong, I am not proud.  I just do my job.  I help people keep promises.  Promises to catch the 3:54 train at Penn. Station, to pick their child up from daycare, to make a chocolate birthday cake with vanilla icing, to clean the house and do the dishes, to keep a child alive who is dying from cancer, to work on that book, to steal money from a neighbor, to visit a grandmother who sits alone in the nursing home, to find clean water and food, to tell the truth, to never tell anyone, to reconnect, to protect and cherish and love and hate and kill and die.  It goes on and I am there, seeing it through.

Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards the color of silver and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in his shaving mirror, paused as if it were waiting for his permission to enter. It rolled forward and cast a dignifying light on everything. The straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive as if it were awaiting an order and Mr. Head's trousers, hanging to the back of it, had an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant; but the face on the moon was a grave one. It gazed across the room and out the window where it floated over the horse stall and appeared to contemplate itself with the look of a young man who sees his old age before him.

Mr. Head could have said to it that age was a choice blessing and that only with years does a man enter into that calm understanding of life that makes him a suitable guide for the young. This, at least, had been his own experience.

Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out.  I will soon be thirty-one years old.  Perhaps.  If my crumbling, over-used body permits.  But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night.  I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning - yes, meaning- something.  I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

"Chopping things is my least favorite part of cooking," she said.

We stood in the kitchen as I sliced a red onion with some difficulty. All our knives are dull and we don't have a cutting board. Every time the knife would get past the resistance created by the thick middle of the onion it would chop down on our linoleum countertop making an abrupt noise that at first made me jump.

 "I like chopping things," I said. "It's so repetitive, and kind of therapeutic. You can just zone out and listen to your thoughts."
"Yea, zone out with a butchers knife in your hand," she laughed, while adding bits of sausage to the frying pan.
We were making a breakfast slop: sausages, onions, and green peppers, with eggs scrambled in. I call it a slop because once all the ingredients were added it looked like a brown lumpy mush. As we cooked the morning summer sun hazily light up our kitchen and we could hear cicadas humming outside our window with the breeze.

  (The sound of cicadas embodies summer in all its lackadaisical bliss: slow mornings, long walks, green trees, beach grass, refreshing breezes, warm sun, hot pavement, subway rides to the beach, watermelon juice, lightening storms, high tide, carnival rides, margaritas, sunblock smell, barbeques, fire pits, nights on the roof, meteor showers, long drives with the windows down, sand dunes, cold soups, life guard chairs and on and on and on. Summer. Season of languid, aimless, felicity.) 

Eating our breakfast we laughed at its unappetizing appearance while asserting that it tasted fine. It did.  Soon after we'd finished eating, she left for work and I sat in the kitchen, sipping coffee.

I wondered what it meant to be so content to do nothing.  Probably, I thought, it means nothing at all; or maybe it means I'm happy.