Desuetude

Excerpt from an unpublished novel

From the age of 17 to 22, I was working on a novel, still unpublished, that I began as a consequence of reading The Sun Also Rises. The uncertainty of life ahead at that age is dulled as the years go on—it isn’t a jadedness, but the reliability that sets in when you know that things will, for the most part, go on; they’ll be okay; the world is not ending today, and if it does, so what? we won’t be around to think about it anyway. The urgency to do something spectacular lulls; and maybe also that urgency is quelled by the slow awareness, like the fog from a headache gradually lifted, that life is not going anywhere. If anything, it becomes progressively more present.

And so it was that by the time I had completed the final chapter, I had gone over the manuscript dozens of times, growing tired of it and feeling as though it was not what it needed to be. So it sat here. But now I’ll share the first page.

Jonelle Summerfield

      June was healthy because it reminded me that the familiar consistency of winter, and the comfortability that set as I finally thought I had adjusted to the cold, was going to be disrupted for a momentary summer that would come and give us the faint illusion that it would never end. The ripeness for change is absent, even as a thought within the late days of April, as spring tries to shake off the wintry winds; unable to do so, it instead leaves us complacent with the days upon which the beating of the far sun is serene enough to warm us from the familiar coolness of that old wintry eternity; but as we anticipate summer, it finally arrives with increasingly warm nights where the particles of the air move faster and grow farther away from another and into another—people are no exception to this rule. Each season is a brief eternity, but the most dangerous one begins in June.

It is probably so because, preferentially, it is unfavorable to move in the cold; and for so long it feels that winter stays, that upon the first few glances of something different, like the prospect of a new love, the allure of greener grass on the side from which the sun rose appears sweeter. But I suppose all sides aren’t really greener: they’re all equal in color and sweetness. And I suppose we underestimate our perceptions relative to where we stand, quick to leave what is for what something else might be; and often too late we discover our error in thinking that one side of the hill might be prettier. But it’s all the same, isn’t it. The hardest choice is to stay where you are and care for the little patch of grass that you do have, keeping it that healthy color, and prevent it from becoming anything else.