Dear Summer

This morning you were smiling at me in the subway. Yesterday you somehow convinced all of my class mates to wear floaty and colorful clothes even though none of us seemed to do that anymore and I am looking forward to the next weeks because you promised to be there the whole time. Right now you are dancing in front of everyone’s windows and the artists are taking pictures of you while I am hiding on my couch because the counterproductive part of my brain is trying to convince me that I should not show up at the party that seems to start everywhere you emerge. But I had the best conversations in your presence and you make looking up to the night sky a little more epic than it already is anyway. I am not the biggest fan of your requirement concerning free time activity because everything you are suggesting is making me feel sweaty and exhausted and consequently quite insecure but then again you always provide me and my friends with ice cream and lemonade so I guess that excuses almost everything even the incident last week, when you infected my friends with the questionable desire to go skinny dipping in front of a lot of strangers. When you first called this year, you told me to start searching for my bright nail polishes and sent me a playlist that sounds as frisky as you look. You are the most skilled gardener I ever met. Every time I walk through a park or a street you worked in, the trees are weaving a shimmering green blanket and you must own a special set of seeds because you are the only one I ever saw growing these flowers you planted everywhere. Recently someone told me they were suspicious you had bribed the sky into only wearing it´s nicest shades of blue for the next couple of months, but I guess you never had to bribe anyone since you are pretty charming. I even consider the possibility that the sky is doing it voluntarily and without your interference, maybe he is trying to impress you. Anyway, I promise to show up at the party, after all you are the best hostess ever. Thanks for convincing my mother to buy me the bright blue dress, for making my almost always sad friends as well as our slightly passive aggressive neighbor smile, for inviting me to the open-air cinema and for just staying in the city. I am looking forward to the car rides with wide open windows, the sticky hands I get from the watermelon you serve, the rare moments in which you convince me that everything is doable and your inspiring approach to the things that don´t work out.

Love,

Nelly

P.S. Did you ever consider cinematography as an alternative career? You light up my bath room in the middle of Thursday afternoons like nobody else.

—By Nelly G., 16, Berlin