I met him under the clearest cerulean sky I’d ever seen in my mediocre lifetime. It was a beautiful day, alive with a gentle wind and a bird’s song playing through the neighborhood. He was on his hands and knees, pulling out the weeds in my neighbor’s garden. When I rested my head on my folded arms on the fence separating our yards and asked who he was, all he did was smile. I never asked what brought him into my life that summer, and he never told me.
Our early May days were devoid of conversation. I took up residence on my back porch, the perfect place to watch him execute each task with the grace and confidence of someone who had been doing it for years. Observing him became my daily fascination, my secret getaway. He had no idea who I was, and he was a stranger to me, yet the prospect of knowing him was too wonderful for me to leave as just a fantasy. Sometimes I wish that I had left it there, with me in the security of my lawn and him as my living dream.
The day that my mother decided she needed someone to tend our garden was the day that ruined all possibilities of distance. He humored my presence the first time I ventured out to really meet him. The day was sweltering, but the sun wasn’t what colored my cheeks.
“You don’t look like the kind of girl who’s friendly with the sun,” he teased, and to say that he was right would be an understatement. I was leaping out of my comfort zone just for the chance to talk to him.
“You don’t look like the kind of boy who’s friendly with the lawnmower.” I remember the defiant set of my jaw, the spark in my chest at our banter. But what has clung to me incessantly was the way he laughed, the way I managed to change his usual somber expression, even if it was just for a second.
If you asked me when I fell in love with him, the truest answer would be that day, that second, that smile. Everything before was infatuation, a crush.
From there, the days only became longer and the sun only became warmer. The boy reserved a place for me under his favorite tree, softening the ground with a cushion from my porch. He could talk for hours and hours about the kinds of things I’d never thought of before. My skin became golden while we figured out what it meant to be alive and he played his favorite, most arcane music. 
He would knit flowers together and drape them over my head during his breaks. Under the shadow cast by the tree we favored, we would cover each other in strawberry lemonade kisses. With my head nestled against him, the boy would paint the promise of autumn before us. For us, September was all we could hope for. When the leaves died and the cooler air swept in, we would be released from the confines of my yard. All we had to do was make it through the summer.
I told him that I loved him in the middle of July. The humidity pressed my head into the grass and dragged the confession through my lips before I could give my consent on the matter. However, any worries I’d had disappeared as soon as they had come. At the sight of his breathtaking smile, I knew that all of the marks he was leaving on my heart were mirrored on his.
It began to rain on the first day of that August and the downpour lasted for two weeks. The boy was further than he’d ever been before. I sat beside my front door each day, watching the showers wash down the road and waiting for my summer love. The two weeks were spent in a state of forced calm, a blanket I wore over my crippling anxiety. For two whole weeks, I didn’t hear a single word out of him.
When he finally showed, he was soaked to the bone and asked only to speak to my mother. I took his coat and hung it beside mine. There was a subtle distance in the way he had held himself beside me. While he was busy, I scribbled a list of what I deemed to be irrefutable truths on a note card and slipped it into the pocket of his rain coat.
I love you
The sky is blue
Whatever happens now, I’ll still love you
I stood beside the door as he left. My mother never divulged the conversation she had with the boy, despite my numerous attempts to find out. Instead, she watched me with a pained expression and kept her lips sewn shut.
The final time I saw him that summer, his limbs weighed him down and his graceful fingers that composed music were limp. He was trying to fix the mess that had become of my neighbor’s garden. His eyes, the deepest warmth I had ever known, locked on to mine as the weeds he had been neglecting latched on to his ankles. The grass sprouted high and wrapped around his neck. I reached out to save him.
Only, he didn’t reach back.
As the darkest parts of him swallowed my summer love whole, I realized that I would never know him outside of the green of my lawn. I would never warm his hands in the snow, never dance with him in the April rain. The ending to our story was one I’d never seen coming, and the effect it had on my precarious teenage self was akin to the sound a house makes as it is being torn down.
A year later, as I sat under the second clearest cerulean sky of my life, all I could see was him. I could only hope that the only boy I ever loved never saw another weed again, even though I felt like every day was a constant battle against them. Every ray of sunshine that touched my neighbor’s wrecked garden squeezed my rib cage to the point of tears. So I was stuck- trapped, staring forever into the places where he had been. Forever waiting for my summer love to return again.