Hi!

Happy July. I hope it is bringing you light.

The last day of June was so oddly intense for me that I found myself blasting “First” by Cold War Kids and and wiping tears from my face like an angsty teen as I walked into my shift at the coffeeshop. I finished another class. I said goodbye to another group of strange, funny, beautiful people. I watched the first half of the year give way to the second. I looked at the calendar and saw that I had lost June. I turned around and it was gone. So this is about loss and grief and love, but mainly about the small things that we feel them for. It’s also about July and what the hell I’ll be doing with all of my free-time these days.

TIME TO GO

It was 10:48 on Friday morning when I finished my Spanish final. It was 10:50 when I walked out of the door and felt the full weight of that. I sat down in the stairwell and placed my hand to my beating heart. I had just finished a marathon that felt like a sprint the whole way through. When I started the class, I barely thought that I could pass it. It was intense, it was a lot, and it was all at once. But somehow along the way I fell in love with the immensity of it. I studied constantly, incessantly. My grade, the one that I prayed to only be passing, was suddenly an A. I began to understand Spanish conversations in the grocery store and at the coffee shop. And more than anything, I fell in love with the little community that inevitably forms when you see the same people in the same place for two hours every day. It became a ritual. I studied, wrote blogs, went to work, and almost never knew what time of day it was for all of June. I could barely breathe. Anytime anyone asked me to do anything, babysit, have coffee, my response was simply “July”. I’ll have time to think straight again in July.

So when I finished that final and sat down on those steps to catch my breath, I expected immense relief. I expected to feel so light, so free. These things have since arrived. But in that moment, I felt heavy. My heart ached. And believe me, I know, this sounds insane. It was just a class, one that I loathed the university for making me take. But it’s me and so I fell in love with it. And when it died, I felt oddly severed from something. But really, the reason I think I felt that ending with such immensity, was that it was a small taste of what is to come this December when I do college for the last time. I know it’s only summer and that I haven’t even begun my final classes, but in a strange way, I’m already grieving them. I’m already imagining what it will feel like to do everything for the last time. Soon, all of this will be a thing that has gone away. It will be time to go and I will be so ready for that, but how strange anyway. How kind of earth shattering to be finishing a phase of your life that has stretched on like banana taffy for what has felt like an eternity contained inside of just one moment.

EPHEMERALITY

I know that I say this all of the time, but the most startling thing about being young is truly how fleeting and flimsy everything is. I suppose that that is what makes it exciting too. People complain all of the time that they have fallen into a rut, that every day is exactly the same as it has been for years. They fantasize about the spontaneity of their youth, probably remembering the rush of it a hell of a lot more than the loneliness of it. I am always saying goodbye. Everything lasts for just one moment. Yes, it is fun and exciting to get new classes and new jobs and to make new friends and date different people, but it’s also a lot. And the only constant of that chaos is you. You get really close to some people at a job or in a class but then those things end and everyone promises to keep in touch but we all inevitably fall back away from each other. I still think about those people, all of the time, even the ones I only knew for a few months, but they are gone. We are all like spinning tops on the plane on the earth, bumping into each other here and there, altering the trajectory of each other’s course, but then falling back away again. We sustain impact, but that is often the only proof that it was real.

LOVE’S SOUVENIR

Which reminds me. I was shamelessly scrolling through Pinterest poetry the other day, as one does, when I read something that made me stop. Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt that we wave in the air that says to the work: Look! Love was once mine. I loved well. Here is my proof that I paid the price. I couldn’t help but think of the first time that my heart ever broke and about how the months that followed such catastrophic teenage devastation felt a lot like war. And when I came out that war, it was pretty clear that I would never be able to go back to how I was before. I was changed, but I liked myself better. I felt that I had done something important, that I had participated in life in the only way that matters. I had felt something so extraordinary that it’s death felt like my own.

This grief is not like that grief. This grief won’t last the week. The reality and excitement of summer will overtake it. But I am grateful for it none the less because it means that something mattered. And more than that, it means that something could matter. I think that once you go through any period of time where you can’t feel, where you would give anything to feel something, the magic of a beating heart is never again lost on you. So I’m grateful to feel everything, even the really small and mundane things like the end of a class, with disproportionate intensity because it makes it all feel important. That’s what I scribbled on a torn off sheet of paper in the Whole Foods parking lot anyway.

HI JULY

But in other, more uplifting news. It’s finally July. That golden month that brings the second, and quite frankly just better, half of the year. I know that time is a construct but I still can’t help but feel like I’ve accomplished something when the month turns to a seven. June always seems like a month of endings, of finishing old things. It’s melancholy in a lot of ways. But July is bright and hot and full of newness and time.

What am I going to do with all of that time?I’m going read in the hammock will my toes in the grass and a bowl of watermelon in my lap. I’m going to delve into some Joan Didion essays and Ocean Vuong prose with religious fervor. Perhaps I’ll get around to reading André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name in honor of the most brilliant coming-of-age film I’ve ever seen. I’ll finally organize my closet that I have been saying “July” to for the past month. I’ll make coffee and listen to music and have sea-salt hair. I’ll wear ridiculous outfits and run around downtown in them with nothing but a seven dollar latte in one hand and a bag full of books in the other. I’ll do nothing at all and then I’ll go to the beach and come home sun-kissed to watch Grey’s Anatomy reruns and cook dinner. I’ll turn twenty-one. I’ll fly to New York. I’ll find a moody, underground jazz bar in Brooklyn and a dreamy rooftop wine garden on the Lower East Side and I will probably be scrawling inky prose onto soggy cocktail napkins the whole time. I promise to share those napkins with you.

Happy Sunday.

With love, m.

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