Summer is a painful season. Beautiful, but wildly painful, just like a complicated teenage relationship.

Physically painful. The type of painful that you feel burning up the soles of your feet and spreading all the way to the crown of your head when you decide to kick off your shoes and carry them around, because the only time you can do that is in the summer.

Emotionally painful. A summer love. Maybe you met at the beach. Maybe at a festival. In the gym. In a favorite restaurant, café, park, bar, subway. Come September, summer will be painful.

Summer is uncomfortable. Like that time you hugged the man facing the elevator door, mistaking him for your father. The sweat that begins to transpire on your chest, then runs down your navel, and finally to the line of shorts. You're not exercising. You're sitting in your car that has been in the sun for over six hours. You have the windows up and the air off. Because you like to feel the heat. Because come winter you can think back to the pools of sweat that collected on the car seat.

Summer is love. Not romantic love. Self love. The sun. The heat. The abandon. The time to think, the time to reflect, the time to make changes and allow yourself to be changed. The calmness and coolness and the ebb and the flow. You fall in love with this. You fall in love with yourself.

Summer is this very moment.