Like a carefree newbie to the city in some insincere love-letter of a book she had read, she longed to play hooky from work one early summer day, when the air was verging on the edge of hotness. Her desire was to escape the heat at that moment just before it hit its mid-day peak, just after the sun had burned away all the muggy morning haze.
Back in her college days, in those late days of senior spring between exams and moving out of the dorms and on to life, she would rouse herself out of bed early enough to have a quick shower and drive her little silver car, glimmering in the sun's late morning sparkle, down the wide, shady green boulevards, air conditioner and stereo blasting, to the cinema just in time for the first matinee of the day. She would park close to the doors, stroll across the grey asphalt with its melting black tar patches and through the almost palpable heat into the cool, empty lobby to purchase her ticket, and then walk down the barren corridor past ghost-town concession stands to the screen she sought that day.
In the cool, dark void of the theater she would slip into an aisle seat about half way down to the screen, settle her purse on the floor, and put her flip-flop shod feet up on the seat-back in front of her, long legs bent at an absurd acute angle, ready to enjoy what amounted to a private screening. At this time of year her fellow collegians were too preoccupied with the baggage of goodbyes, and the school children were still in their classrooms, not free for another week or two, leaving the cinema to her alone.
When the slick, cloying ads and useless trivia stopped, the previews offered a glimpse of films she would later see while crowded into tourist packed cinemas at night after days at work in her last summer job. And then, as the studios and production companies announced themselves and the music playing over the opening credits began, all she could see projected before her was the open freedom of her coming summer by the sea, and stretching beyond that, the rest of her life, obscured by the lingering haze of that fine early summer day, on which she could pretend to have no worries, or at least push them aside.
And now, far from the suburban boulevards, she knew that particular cool emptiness was only available to her at times when she was sitting in front of an all too clear computer screen, feet planted firmly on the ground, even if they were still in flip-flops. She wondered what it would be like to go to her favorite out-of-the-way cinema next to the wide, brackish river (so different from her bracing blue summer sea, yet still so soothing to her soul) and glide up the chilled, quiet escalators to seek out that sanctuary she remembers so fondly, while the rest of the city keeps its head down in pre-lunch routines: answering phones, sorting email, securing that next big meeting.
She might even turn her BlackBerry off, truly let the calm silence envelop her as she is carried away by a mindless, yet thoughtfully constructed, film deemed by some distant men to be perfect for an audience on the cusp of summer. Did those men in their bungalows know what she needed to put before her eyes today? What she needed to take her back to the possibilities that once lay ahead? She wasn't sure anymore if they were all still there, or if they too had burned away under so many summer suns.
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