Dreading Summer

I may be the only person who dreads summer. Unlike everybody who loves the sun so much, I don’t. It is not that I abhor the sun, it’s just with the intense heat it brings, I experience difficulty in breathing, like I’m being smothered by warm invisible hands, eager to take my breath away. Summer hasn’t always given me this kind of negative feeling. When I was young, I used to anticipate the end of classes so I could enjoy summer vacation playing with my cousins and friends. Now, with the temperature several degrees above the normal summer I used to enjoy, I would rather deprive myself of that precious Vitamin D and keep myself safe from dangerous ultraviolet rays. I don’t get people who would choose to bask in a sort-of-earthly-hell-kind-of-sun, wearing a skimpy bikini while men ogle at their oh-so-perfect-cellulite-free bodies. Maybe it’s just their way of showing off? I really don’t get it. Summer means increased cost of electric bills and also with the water bills. Summer means skin rashes and asthma attacks; sunburn and forest fires. It means heat waves and heat strokes; drought and famine; skin disease from contaminated pools and worse, skin cancer from that dreadful sun. No amount of positive explanation could ever convince me that summer is actually a happy season. How could I enjoy this season with all of this happening? Bikinis and break from work are not reason enough to mask horrors of what summer could bring. I don’t mean to be pessimistic, but if global warming wasn’t as worse as it is now, then maybe summer would be more tolerable and everybody would actually enjoy it.