It was my son’s birthday, and we had pizza for dinner. He’s sixteen now, but still a child, and one day his metabolism will betray him. Not a dramatic, film-worthy twist, mind you. Just in a quiet, creeping way that announces itself by making the waistband of your shorts feel like a judgment. But for now, he is young and delighted, and the smell of pepperoni grease and melting mozzarella still clings to the air like incense in a church that worships tomato sauce.
The sky was doing its summer opera with clouds dancing in extravagant ball gowns, sweeping across a stage of blue and flaming tangerine. I sat with my wife on the back porch, a glass of wine sweating in my hand. It too was overwhelmed by the beauty of the evening. The kids ran barefoot in the yard, tossing a football and yelling at each other in that affectionate, sibling tone that hovers between “I love you” and “You’re dead to me.”
It should have been perfect. It was perfect. And yet …
There’s a certain kind of sadness that doesn’t earn the dignity of a cause. It’s not the kind that arrives because you lost your job or your dog died or your pants shrank. No, this is the quiet, sneaky sadness. The kind that sidles up next to you in the middle of a sunset and whispers, “Yes, this is all very nice, but what if you’re just…not feeling it?”
I call it the Summer Sadness™, a very specific brand of melancholy that arrives only when things are too good, when you’ve actually had time to write and some of it, shockingly, doesn’t completely suck. When your health has finally stopped acting like a gremlin with a grudge. When the days are long, and the mornings are lazy, and you have no real complaints except for the existential dread that buzzes in your chest like a refrigerator you forgot was plugged in.
It’s the calm before the chaos of the school year begins. Soon, we’ll be setting alarms again. Lunchboxes will demand packing. Papers will go unsigned. And someone (probably me) will forget about picture day and send a child to school in a ketchup-stained Minecraft shirt. But tonight? Tonight, it’s just us and the evening.
I played catch with the kids. I laughed. I drank my wine. The rain began to fall softly, as if trying not to ruin the mood. The sunset lit the sky like the ending of a movie we didn’t want to end. And yet, sitting there, I felt like I was watching it through a pane of glass. Present, but not. A spectator in my own joy.
I don’t think anything’s wrong, exactly. Sometimes your soul just doesn’t get the memo that things are okay. Sometimes it wants to lie in bed with the curtains drawn, even when everything outside is glowing.
Tomorrow will be here soon. And soon there will be backpacks and bus stops and the return of things that are loud and necessary. The world will start spinning faster again. Maybe that’s what the sadness is: the preemptive mourning of the slowness, the sweetness, the pizza-scented sacredness of a warm summer night.
Or maybe I’m just tired. That happens sometimes.