Even if your voice comes back again, maybe there’ll be no one listening.

It was the only time in my life that I wanted summer to end.

As a kid, you wish summers could last forever. You survey the horizon from the vantage point of mid-June and it feels like you’ve got an entire lifetime’s worth of school-free days ahead of you. Days to be lazy. Days to hang out with friends. Days to spend at the beach, or cruising around your neighborhood on bikes, refusing to waste even a second of daylight. And frankly, as a kid, summers kind of do last forever, simply because two and a half months is still such a significant amount of time in the grand scheme of how long you’ve been alive. Relative to everything else, summer is endless.

As a teenager, you still wish summers could last forever, but you also have enough perspective on time to know that they’ll end up passing you by so much faster than you think. You’ll blink twice and suddenly it will be mid-August, and you’ll be left wondering where all those weeks went. As the onslaught of September and the first day of school approaches, you cling to the remaining 80-degree days and the dwindling summer sunsets like they’re oxygen, because the thought of losing that freedom again and going back to the cloistered halls of your high school feels all wrong.

Growing up, I certainly never thought I’d find myself wishing for summer to hasten its demise, but that’s exactly where I found myself in late August of 2008. For one thing, I didn’t think I could stand one more second working my shitty summer job. But the bigger factor at play was her, the girl I’d spent the summer chasing. At so many moments throughout that season, amidst so many flirtations and longing glances and intoxicated evenings where we got a bit closer than we should have, I thought we were only a matter of time. She’d break up with her boyfriend and choose me, and we’d spend the summer together, making every moment count. But she didn’t break up with her boyfriend, and she didn’t choose me, and before I knew it, we’d run out of time.