Summer. Certainly, I can think of worse times to be alive. It was like a short-handed note. Something you penned after waking up from a daydream.

Lucid.

 Your hand moved as quickly as the bubbling of the fountain Trevi. If it were a book, its binding would’ve loosened.

Or you would’ve taken it to Ibiza and lost it on an EasyJet flight. Truth be told, sometimes you can’t help but be a forgetful prick.

 A lot of the time, you wish you had paid closer attention. Your drifting eyes trapped on the sight of topless ladies.

A street fight with glass bottles and pepper spray jilts you back to the present moment, an afternoon bike ride you took braless through the streets of Milan.

So cultured.

You managed to not lock yourself out of your Airbnb that day. That precarious, exhilarating night.

 As were many.

You’d fall into your feverish dreams under the sheet of one country only to widen your weepy eyes in another.

Memories of stationary work days, as uneventful as Paris permitted them to be, drip down the side of a cocktail glass at Le Perchoir, the Tour staring bleary eyed back at you and your crazies.

“work kills”

Maybe you should’ve listened when your mom told you to drink less. As you sped across Ponte Sant’Angelo, the expletives she’d use to denounce the childish ways you play with your life play over and over in the back of your head.

But, if nothing else, at least you stopped to talk to strangers. To pour the warmth of a full smile into their hands. To feed the mouths of hungry kittens with strawberry yogurt left in the hotel fridge. Sat still and quiet in deep reflectivity even when your legs wouldn’t stop moving.

On day 84 you feel proud of everything you did. The smells and sounds and feelings of it all, now a ghost walking the corridor of the summer of your life.