That summer of… Lucía Lijtmaer: what never ends

It all begins on June 22, 1999, the day that marks the beginning of summer. It is exactly that day, that very morning, that I realize that everything has just gone to shit. I am in a neighborhood in the south of London where I have just spent the most important nine months of my life, or at least that is what I feel, where I have turned twenty-one and now it is time to return home. And the worst of all is that I have a terrible hangover.

It’s horrible to have a hangover on a beautiful June morning in such circumstances. The weather doesn’t match your grief. You want it to rain and it won’t. Bees buzz around the parks, people are having barbecues outside and the sun caresses the cheeks and ankles of all the students who pass by me, with books, guitars or cardboard boxes. Everyone is happy because summer is coming and I’m dragging a suitcase that’s too heavy through a bar with tables painted in colours, trying to order a coffee. I have a tremendous, filthy hangover, like having drunk so much that I want to forget that I’m leaving my paradise, the university of humanities where I just finished my Erasmus and where I’ve met the closest friends I’ve ever had, my soul mates.

The last thing I remember is taking shots of something in a carpeted room and dancing to Prodigy. All my friends must be asleep and I am now the first one who has to go to the airport. At the bar, with a splitting headache and an upset stomach, I think I will order a coffee. When I bring it to my lips, I smell alcohol and I tell myself that it is not possible, that I am imagining it, so I gulp it down. Yes, it has alcohol in it. They made me a carajillo by mistake. Who makes a carajillo by mistake? From that café run by some fool I look out at the beautiful June morning, something inside me finally gives way and tears the size of marbles begin to roll down my cheeks. I am unhappy. I am as unhappy as can be, or so I think, because I am twenty-one years old and the world is for me the desert steppe of the summer that is about to begin.

Let’s face it, my summer of 1999 was not a good summer. I missed my old life, I wanted to be with my friends in that south London neighborhood but I couldn’t, so I sank into a lethargic sadness that lasted all July and August, until I had to go back to school, to finish my degree. I lay on the sofa and watched as much television as possible. All of it. From eleven in the morning until eleven at night. Occasionally I would go get a soft drink from the refrigerator and look at my face in the mirror, which for me took on iridescent colors, somewhere between green and lilac. My corneas were suffering the effects of watching reruns of TV without any respite. Baywatch either The Sweet Valley Twins for so many hours. My poor, worried parents were doing what all parents try to do with their children in the summer. Which is to repeat over and over the phrase: “Cheer up, go out and get some fresh air and sunshine, it will do you good,” even if it falls on deaf ears. The last thing a twenty-something in an existential crisis wants is to be touched by the air. The last thing they want is to turn the page, to try to be happy.

During that summer I remembered everything I had experienced that year. I had danced non-stop, I had gone to plays in pubs, I had discovered frost at dawn, I had exchanged new books, I had seen strange and revealing exhibitions, I had gotten to know Ireland, I had rung the bell in illegal bars with metal detectors, I had asked a girl to play music, I had seen a girl with a gun … DJ with her face completely tattooed, she had kissed non-stop, she had traveled on a ferry, she had made tortillas for twenty people, she had seen fireworks in the middle of the forest, she had walked along the riverbank surrounded by friends bursting out laughing. And a million other things that I don’t remember.

Over time, I realized that my summer had actually lasted the entire previous year. A perfect nine-month summer. And finally, I got off the couch.