August 27th - "The Final View"

"What's happening to me? I must get well again; I have so much to do!"

     - Frederick III, four months after becoming Kaiser of Germany, four days before dying of throat cancer

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Ignore chapter title - it’s August 31st in East Eden. A lot of people, including some experts, say that summer ends on September 21st. But c’mon - at the start of September, you go back to school, summer vacations end, traffic picks up, nights start getting a little chilly. Summer ends on August 31st, and it was on this day that Lucille, Jackie, and Regina sat atop the concrete platform below a telephone pylon and gazed out at the sunset.

Lucille and Regina, ever since their treasure hunt, had been in a telephone trail exploration kind of mood (well, Lucille was - Regina just followed along). They went in the opposite direction of their earlier adventure and found a utility pylon on a quiet hill above the highway. They could even park just five minutes away and walk up asphalt rather than chop their way through thick foliage. Maybe that kind of meant they weren't explorers, but perhaps finding the utility pylon hill in general was the best they could do for modern-day exploration. 

Up this high on the hill, Lucille alternated between laying on her back across the concrete platform, or sitting upright and gazing down at suburbia below. She spotted the rival highpoint in East Eden, a big hill that was the domain of high schoolers, along with the town’s McDonalds, the abandoned basketball court where Jackie flayed her finger, her own house, and the convenience store she often walked to during quiet mornings and loud evenings.

And beyond it all, through the various woodlands that popped up throughout suburbia, she spotted the neighboring town - Eden. East Eden had to be east of somewhere called Eden, right? Eden was founded by a Puritan, its wealthy population primarily worked in the tertiary sector of the economy and lived in rows of colonial houses, and its the students went to a huge high school that carved out a spot for itself on several national rankings. Sitting next to Lucille on that concrete platform, Jackie did her duty by flipping off Eden - it was their athletes who eliminated her East Eden basketball team in the state semi-finals, it was their students whom Jackie beat up in the parking lot after a particularly rowdy football game (she won), it was their children who had two parents while Jackie's parents had split and bolted. 

Long ago - perhaps even sometime ago - Lucille shared her hatred. Because Eden was it, and East Eden certainly wasn't it. But things change. Even if was while she was kicking and scream, Lucille got older and realized she was still young. Eden was cool, but East Eden was home, and its sleepy streets always welcomed her back. Nowadays, Lucille didn’t mind looking at Eden all that much - she would’ve loved to have grown up there, but her vision continued to drift back toward East Eden, warts and all. Maybe the place that's just east of Eden, if you looked at the right way, could be Eden itself after all. 

“The last sunset on the last day of summer,” Lucille said aloud, her voice slow and relaxed. Out in the distance, on the horizon, the summer sun bade its final farewells. And it was a magnificent goodbye - the whole sky was ablaze with bright orange, clouds twirling and reflecting purple light as the sun slowly, reluctantly, dipped out of sight, off to rest for another year. The end of summer only came once a year, and Lucille wouldn’t miss it for the world - she was the one who dragged her friends up here to see it.

Jackie just groaned. Lucille glanced at her with a smirk. “Ah c’mon, it’s not so bad being back home, is it?”

A pair of crossed arms answered her. Jackie's lease in the city technically ended today, but she had already moved back home to East Eden. “Home”, of course, meaning Regina’s house, because Jackie’s mother was in California with her new family and Jackie’s dad was up north renting from a college buddy.

“Regina’s a god awful roommate,” Jackie said, ignoring the mute stare of her cousin. “Constantly complaining, never cooks dinner, refuses to say good night to me.”

“I always say good night,” Regina answered. She laid across the platform, her eyes closed, enjoying the last breeze of summer.

The sight of her cousin made Jackie sit still for once, and she ended up enjoying it too. “Alright, alright. Fair enough.”

The trees of the domesticated forests across East Eden swayed in the breeze. Streaks of pink now arched across the sky as the summer sun now displayed one last blast of brilliance. Lucille sighed, feeling content.

“Did I ever tell you guys about Whisper of the Heart?”

“Every year,” Regina answered.

“Is that one of your animes?” Jackie asked, tilting her head. “You've never showed me it.”

Lucille chuckled. “Well, Whisper of the Heart is slice of life, and you’re more into…blood. And violence.”

The pylon droned. Jackie nodded vigorously. “Of course. I love action shit. There was that one with rap and samurai and all that.”

“Samurai Champloo?” Lucille asked.

“Yeah! That’s the one. And there was that one with jazz and space cowboys.”

Regina kept her eyes closed. “Bebop.”

“Exactly! And you showed me one more. It was about this kid, and he lives with his grandpa and brother in this nice neighborhood, and he like grows up and gets into wacky adventures and stuff.”

Lucille sighed. “The Boondocks isn’t an anime.”

“...oh. Well, what’s Whisper of the Heart about, then?”

Lucille closed her own eyes and smiled. “It’s what inspired me to be a writer. It’s about this girl in Tokyo, right? All she does is read fairytales and she’s looking for a purpose in life. She meets a guy who’s found his purpose, so she decides to prove herself by taking all her knowledge from reading stories and writing one herself.”

Out in the distance, Shizuku Tsukishima drifted slowly through the clouds in all her 90s cel animation glory. If you looked at both her and Lucille from a certain angle, then perhaps you'd realize they had the same brown-colored hair, the same short stature, the same love of writing, and perhaps you could even go as far as to say that Lucille is Shizuku years after her movie, once she's grown up and been thrust into a world far beyond her fairy tales. 

“But she gets obsessed with proving she's good enough," Lucille continued. "She poisons her friendships and relationship with her family by focusing too much on it. By the end of the film, she’s a lonely wreck. But she finishes writing her book and realizes it’s a long road to being good at something, so she feels happy about her progress and finds her own self-worth.”

Regina shifted on the concrete platform to lay on her side. “How relatable.”

“It’s extremely relatable! You see, the main character in her story is inspired by a statuette owned by this antique owner. In exchange for letting her use the statue as the main character, the old owner says he wants to be the first to read her story. So he reads it, and Shizuku’s so scared, because it’s the first thing she’s ever written. And when he says he likes it, she doesn’t believe it, because she’s realized there’s so much she doesn’t know about writing. And then he says-”

Lucille tossed an empty plastic water bottle at Jackie. It smacked her across the head, waking her back up.

“He says it’s raw and heartfelt,” Lucille continued. “Raw and heartfelt. She’s just a beginner, but she did it. She wrote a book, and just completing a book takes dedication and passion. He’s proud of her, and Shizuku’s proud of herself. But don’t you see?”

Regina shrugged. “I’ll be honest, I’m more of a Porco Rosso kind of girl-”

“Don’t you see?” Lucille interrupted. “The guy who made Whisper of the Heart - he’s Shizuku! This was his first ever film. And the old antique owner who reads her work - that’s Miyazaki! Miyazaki was getting old and looking for a successor at Ghibli. So this guy Kondo, who worked on Miyazaki's earlier films - they gave him the chance to make his own film. It’s a metaphor! Shizuku worrying about her own work, worried the antique owner will hate it - that’s Kondo worrying about how Miyazaki will see his work! Miyazaki saw Whisper of the Heart as raw and heartfelt. The whole backstory to it all…man, I love that film.”

Then Lucille sighed. Purple had overtaken the sky, the orange whittled down to just a thin band over the horizon. “But Kondo himself became obsessed. Or maybe it was the work culture. I don’t know. But he became just like Shizuki, working so hard, working too hard. Shizuku learns that she needs to take care of herself, otherwise she’d ruin herself by becoming obsessed with her stories. But Kondo himself…he didn’t take care of himself. He died from overwork a couple years after making Whisper of the Heart. It was the only movie he directed. There’s a reason why Ghibli stopped releasing films so frequently.”

Lucille watched the purple sky above. The pylon droned, the cicadas droned, the crickets chirped. All of them seemed to recognize the end of summer was upon them.

“I don’t know if there’s a point to my story,” Lucille admitted. “Maybe I just need to tell someone. Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about death. People die too early. Look at Kondo. Look at Satoshi Kon.”

But then she smiled and leaned back, resting the back of her head on her hands, gazing at the last moment of summer that stretched before her across the sky. “Whisper of the Heart may be done. Kondo and Kon may be done. But we’re still here, at least, and summer will come around again. And when you know summer will come around again, things aren’t so bad. Let’s go to the beach next summer. Let’s walk the streets of the city next summer. Let’s go on a hike or a vacation or a cruise or a flight or a drive or cliff jumping or something grand and spectacular. Let’s have a fall, let’s have a winter, let’s have a spring, let’s go live a little.”

Birds flew overhead and Lucille smiled because she was ready for next summer, but more important, she was ready for this winter, for this fall, for tomorrow, for the present moment.

Jackie coughed. “...anime is Chinese, right? I can never remember.”

Regina tossed her own empty water bottle at her. Then she sat up and stretched her arms.

“I appreciated the tale, Lucille. There’s always a story behind something.” She cracked her neck and her fingers. “But speaking of Chinese, let’s get some. I’m starving.”

Jackie bolted upright. “Let’s do it! It always smells best on the way going home.”

“I’ll eat it in your room,” Regina threatened. “Make a big mess, spill some duck sauce on your floor, ‘cuz I hate you so much.”

“I’ll shit in your bed,” Jackie retorted. Regina couldn’t compete with that kind of firepower, so she went to watch the sunset.

For the best view of summer's end, all three of the women laid on their backs once more, watching the sky do tricks above them. The orange was gone; the pink and purple had receded, most of the sky giving way to a blue twilight and the approaching autumn night. Autumn! Even the mere mention of the word excited Lucille.

“Flannel and pumpkins,” she mumbled, not expecting the others to hear her.

“Apple picking,” Regina answered.

“All those sports,” said Jackie.

“Yup,” the three women said in unison.

“Yup.”

“Yup.”

A spectacular band of blue now covered the sky above them, and the breeze that came with it - this wasn’t a laid back summer sort of breeze, this one was chilly, carrying a slight edge to it, a gentle coolness that marked it as autumnal. A few leaves fluttered from trees; Lucille smiled at the sight of East Eden in transition below her.

“It’s a good life we live,” she said, sitting back upright.

Regina shook off the rust and stood next to Lucille. “And may it never change.”

Jackie joined them. “And may it never change us.”

“Yup.”

“Yup.”

And that’s how summer went, a faint wisp of blue disappearing into the horizon, but this season will come around again and again and again.