Excerpt
…before the cloudy days of August, there was little reprieve from the sun. Swimming in a body of cool water seemed like a far away memory when biking outside underneath the trees with the hot road stretched out before me. When I arrived home, I usually ran to take a cold shower. I wanted the water icy cold. I thought about lounging in a pool, floating and looking up at the sky. Sometimes I went to a friend’s pool near Esplanade Ave. The pool was behind a small house surrounded by palm trees. There was a lime tree on the side, next to a table and some chairs. Over on the patio near the back door there were some couches. It seemed no one entered the house through the front door, but instead walked to the wooden door in the back and down the path leading to the yard. The pool had several steps to the bottom, and the interior of the pool was a soft sea green. That particular day it was three of us. We swam lazily and talked about what we did during the day, and what we actually wanted to do with our lives. I always felt odd saying I was a writer; it had become on and off, or maybe it was always like that, only now I recognized that my motivation disappeared more often. I swam from one side to the other or floated on my back. Sometimes we congregated near the edge to sip some wine, saying a few things here and there. I went back to floating, letting their voices travel. There were some hues of greens, purples and grays, possibly from the cement tiles. I don’t know where they came from, but there was a orderly wildness about the backyard from the plants in the outer edges, the lime trees, the yellow Dutch shoes left randomly on a table, but yet, purple flowers had fallen from the shrubs and were lazily floating along the pool.
Portrait of June 