Hi!

How have you been? What’s on your mind?

My infamous Spanish class has just a few days left and then it’s officially summer. Is it weird that I’m going to miss this class? Or that it’s somehow already summer again?

THE HAZE OF JULY

Summer has always been a real mental trip for me. Remember how everyone went crazy during the pandemic because there was nothing to do and no where to be? That’s how summer has always felt to me. Three months of time standing still. Three months of not knowing what hour it is, what day it is. I used to float on my back in the blue swimming pool and stare up into the blue sky and lose all sense of difference between the two. Those months had a way of merging everything together like that. All of your selves, all of your worlds, into one.

What I mean by that is that most of the time, we traverse several different worlds within the course of a single day. There’s the world of home, of family, and then there’s the world of work, school. There’s a sphere to the grocery store and a sphere to the post office. When you go for a walk, you choose what world you want to stroll through. This side of town, or that. And within each society lives a slightly varied version of our selves. It’s interacting with all of those different societies that proves to me that I am alive. I don’t know why talking to the barista in the morning about something random makes me feel better about life, just that it does. I don’t know why hearing about what movie my professor watched with his family last night makes me feel less alone, only that it always does. I need these moments, these interactions, like I need air to breathe. They inspire me and reveal the invisible thread that binds all of us together. Summer has always lacked those moments for me. Or, made them exponentially more difficult to stumble into.

EMERGING ANEW

But the strange thing, the thing that amazes me year after year, is how despite the feeling of stillness that permeates these sunken months, once they end, I always feel utterly transported. It’s like falling asleep on a train and waking up in a place that you don’t remember feeling your body arrive at. I never remember the exact bumps and turns in the road, only that I am somehow in a place that I didn’t used to be in. I think that this probably started with the school system and how it is set up to give you a fresh start every fall. But it’s more than that. It’s this shedding of the self that has never escaped me. Like the trees come October, every summer I die a little bit and start again. I turn another year older. I try to hold the months neatly in my hand but they always end up dripping down my wrists like a popsicle in July. As a kid, I could only eat ice cream out of a cup. Even then, the quickness with which something sweet could turn into nothing under pressure startled me. I wanted to contain it. Even if it all turned to liquid, it would be contained in a bowl, not down my arms and going away from me. Strange kid.

But that is how summer feels. Even now, as an adult with a job and travel plans and adventures to be had with the world during my summer, I can still feel the eerie change that is to arrive come August. I can still myself being transported, silently, through the warm air as I do nothing but watch the butterflies land. I may be busy now, I may have things to do and places to be, but the unspoken magic of July is not lost on me. It still wraps its arms around my waist and carries me through the year, but those arms just feel like rays of sunlight falling into my eyes. They blind me every year so that come fall, when I open my eyes, I find myself seeing things that I never saw before.

Perhaps three months of thinking and feeling without distraction is bound to do that. You can’t just stare into the melting sky, listening to Bon Iver all afternoon and expect to not come out of it changed in some way. I wouldn’t want to, either.

love, m.

JOIN THE FUN

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