I hate summer....

I hate summer.

I hate it so much. I hate the heat, those humid windless days, the bright sun, all the free time with nothing to do but have myself as company.

And to be perfectly honest, I really don't enjoy being with myself.

I hate the memories of summer.

I never really enjoyed summer even as a kid. We never really did go out on summer holidays even when I was little. I never really got to know my neighbors' kids so I just stayed at home and watched TV (all five channels of it at the time), read my Choose Your Own Adventure books or just played with my Legos. Yes, there were some outings...but these were pretty rare and far in-between.

My parents loved me, like all parents loved their children, though as a kid they never really doted on me during my idle times, and I don't remember talking with them or doing anything much with them. My dad used to play scrabble with me when I was much younger, say seven or eight, though it didn't carry on when I got a bit older. So summers were invariably a time of solitude. Just me, myself, TV, and my books and toys.

I was too little to get out of the house on my own when I was in elementary school. Even if I did, at the time there were hardly any fast food joints or malls, so summers where mostly times where I did the usual...watched TV, read books, played with my toys, or just thought.

When I was in high school I never really formed any tight bonds with my classmates, so I never had a reason to go out during the summer.

My first girlfriend broke up with me on a summer. She did that by mail since she was already back home in a province to the north. This was a time before cellphones, before SMS, before email, before chat, and, needless to say, it sucked. Though it didn't start out at such, it eventually became a long-distance relationship. I'm not having one of those again.

Later on I got married, but it didn't work out. It ended on a hot, balmy summer day. A year after a petition for annulment was filed. It was another summer. Trips to the psychiatrist and a bunch of hearings, most of them during the summer.

For three different summers I spend most of my time alone just reading and studying, preparing for the Bar exams. It was on three other summers that the results were released, and no, I didn't make it.

When I already had a kid, summer for me was no different. My son would almost always go on long trips with his mother during summer, and again, I often find myself alone at home. At the time, if I wasn't studying or preparing for the Bar exams, there was already cable and video games so it really wasn't as boring as it used to be when I was a kid, but still...most of the time it was just me, and myself.

Now it's another summer. And it's just as bad...maybe even worse than my usual summers. A good summer for me is a summer where nothing bad happens. During the last month, two negative things have already happened. Summer strikes again.

I guess it's not summer's fault, but I really hate the memories I have of summer. Mostly they're memories of solitude, nothingness, pain, disappointment, frustration...and the trend doesn't seem to have changed, even to the present.

I wish summer would end.