July is the cruelest month, full of wicked intermittent preludes to the suffering of August. September is a month of deception with false promises of better times.
Bad parodies of ‘The leaves of Grass’, months interchanged for dark humour which linger long enough to be uncomfortable.
From the first chirps of the Cicadas in July , the rapturous choirs of August to the carcasses littered around early September, we have passed through summer. Grudging the humid and hot days and wistfully wishing them back when the chill sets in, the love for summer is ambiguous.
Summer was supposed to be the last hope, when the pandemic would die down, apparently due to the heat. We loved summer till summer came, with disappointments and the realisation that an innocent hope is a false hope.
Someone called 2020 a ‘Leap Year’, the derived meaning to a casual observer much different from what he meant. He meant that we would leap over this year, passing it as one would pass a missing step.
Others have called it a wasted year, when many people lost a lot. What was lost is there for all to see, what was gained was the sense that how little is actually needed.
If we learn from the realisation that want was wasted, will we learn to want once again. The casual excesses, the little joys which filled long days, will we lose them to a life of learned deprivation.
The business meetings turn virtual, travel is sold through the viewfinders of others, eating out turns into delivery or takeouts and the extra time that is saved from not traveling is sometimes spent on exercise.
Grocery shopping turns into a time bound exercise, gyms lay down limits on how long you can exercise and hygiene , never ignored in the the sometimes ‘disinfected sterile ‘ Japan is even more important than ever.
Masks, always in fashion in Japan, turn omnipresent . People turn unrecognisable , a casual greeting from someone can take minutes, hours or sometime days to reveal the identity of the greeter.
The early morning mists of winter, the colour bursts of spring, the cicada cacophony of the delayed summer and the scattered cicada carcasses of an early autumn, all come with the hope and the longing for what was before.
The cicadas, whether screaming or dead, tell us something. They tell us when summer is here and when it is gone. The stillness of the mornings without the cascading chorus tell us that something is changing.
What has been learned over the months cannot be unlearned. It brings a fear of normalcy, because we have seen that was was normal and taken for granted can so easily be destroyed.
An endless hope is a wasted hope, a stretch of time with no legs to stand on. But despair is not the answer, the answer probably is in forgetfulness.
When we reach the end of the year, maybe we should not stop to think about what we left behind. Maybe we can convince ourselves we leapt over the year and did not look down!!
