Cicadas hum. The South China Sea ripples, an endless sheet of azure glass shattered by light. Rice fields bow and rise in the wind.
In the distance, an old Vietnamese man pedals slowly through the green, his conical hat tilting like a sail against the late light. In the seaside town of Hoi An, you see these hats everywhere… on the heads of elderly locals, on curious tourists wobbling through the lanes. They’re woven from palm leaves, stitched with bamboo, sometimes brushed with faded ink paintings of rivers or mountains, fragile as paper, yet carrying centuries of sun.
The clouds thicken, the man drifts further down the path, and I feel myself dissolving into the slipstream of something older than hours. My skin smells of salt and coffee. Limbs browned, slackened, baptized by this endless ambling summer.
Through squinted eyes I watch the banyan trees make their slow circles, swaying like hips at 4 am, having lost their grace but not their appeal.
The afternoon unspools promising and restless. So many things that could be done, but I know I’ll end up on the back of a motorcycle, chasing sunset into the veins of old town, hair and hands twirling in the wind, tasting that delirious, delicious shiver of being young and uncontained.
Today is a string of half-remembered déjà vus, a subtle kind of melancholy that knows late summer well. Sweet, fading, golden, gone.
The cicadas seem to ask: August has knocked and left. What now, dear?
My dreams blur fiction and fancy, memories in the half-awake. Consciousness turns liquid, and I could almost believe.
Youth is a religion after all, and we worship it with fanatic devotion.
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