A wisp of summer is in the air—a wisp of normalcy, rather. 

With our beloved seniors throwing their caps above the horizon and the temperatures slowly, but surely, rising, normalcy is whispering. 

A normal summer—what a dream. What a fantasy, an illusion. I’ve dreamt and hoped for it, for my senior year to be okay. Normalcy has been absent from our grasp for so long now that it feels almost unreachable. But now, as life is beginning to turn around, that normalcy doesn’t feel quite as unreachable.

Just as life is beginning to be filled with warm breezes, salty air, and melting ice cream cones, I can see—almost hold—the sense of regularity. I can only think of what life was like when I didn’t have a source of camouflage covering the better half of my face. Life isn’t as jubilant when the sole feature of everyone’s face is clandestine; life isn’t as carbonated.

But now, my hope is returning as a hint of normalcy teases the community. Perhaps it’s a false hope—because we’ve had so many false hopes in this past chapter of our lives—but this time, this one particular time, it feels that we’re not being fibbed. Our lives have the potential of drastically changing, altering—and it’s for the best.  

And it feels so good.

It feels so good to have an incentive of some sort, to assist in getting through this never-ending, page-ripping chapter. It’s uplifting. 

As the fourth season is known to bring undeniable availability and bliss, last year, it failed us—well, failed me if not you. 

So to you, the summer of my senior year, I am counting on you to make up for all of the loss. The loss of celebration, independence, and euphoria. Summer twenty-one, I am relying on you to resupply what I’ve missed so much and prepare me greatly for my final year of high school.

Because normalcy is right around the corner—I can feel it. 

So now, I percept ordinariness as hinting itself towards society, and if inversed, we can only hope that it’s giving us a meager amount of serotonin despite its pithiness.