a love letter

This Summer feels like the Summer I’m always waiting for. When it’s colder and I’ve become a new version of myself, I’ll try to come back here. I’ve learned about Summer and how it can feel lonely and suffocating and fleeting, loneliness is such a huge component of every new season – you’re entering a huge open and empty room, your voice echos and you don’t remember who your friends are or who you’ve given access to. Experiencing the shift in seasons is weird in the way that I am getting older and my hair is getting longer, but I look the same and I still don’t have a place to put down the things I’m becoming. The first instinct in this room is fear, but the next stage is realizing that everything is all up to me. I suppose this Summer felt like walking into the same room, but the walls greet me and the floor is happy to feel the weight of me again. It’s my house, it has every part of me in it. A shoe out of place, dead flowers in glass vases, a bowl of tangled jewelry and mix-matched earrings, a box of every letter I’ve ever been given. Making a mess, cleaning, making a mess again, it’s all very known. I know who I am and I know who my friends are, and I know what love is because I decided to be made of it. Nothing new needs to be formed here, and nothing ever is, only ideas that need to be revisited. Realities I choose to assemble with an intensity and playfulness that’s lived inside of me my whole life.

I’ve spent a great deal of July staring at the sun. It’s hard to look at for too long, but so are most things. My eyes squint and water and adjust to its harshness, knowing that tears are inevitable when faced with something too bright and too fast. Tears are always followed by adjustment, by adapting to the change at hand - they've done this before. I have spent an equal amount of time looking down at my feet - watching my toes dig crevices in the sand on the shore, then watching the waves fill them back up. My feet on my yoga mat, taking me through the ebb and flow of fluidity. My feet in the grass as I lay reading, and my feet slightly burnt after running through overheated sand in the mid-day heat. They’ve taken me places this Summer - I am grateful for the sturdiness they provide and the movement they insist on. All the Summers that have come before have brought me to this one, this Summer that has brought me closer to divinity than I ever thought I could get on my own. Closer to what I’ve learned to call God, although it’s an ever-changing premise that has always seemed more futile than anything in my head. People are kind and true when they are watched by something they fear. My God is the woman I want to be - she’s always watching, always guiding. I used to feel to violent about the fact that no one else can take me where I want to go, that I must be the one to bridge the gaps between me and her. That whatever I’m waiting for isn’t coming because it’s waiting for me, and instead of going to get it, I’m trying to find shortcuts. There was such sweetness and such relief when I learned that there is no shortcut, no way around what must be felt. The certainty of watery eyes and sunburns and hot sand and sweat is better than the uncertainty of avoiding it all. At the end of Summer, once the tears are dry and burns have healed, I’m more myself than I was at the start of it all.

I have a habit of thinking everything I love only belongs to me. No one can have Summer in the way I have it. No one can love my favorite movie in the way I do or listen to my favorite song the way I do or like the same art because they would not love and understand it like me. My experiences make me more connected and interesting - this is a fact in my head. But then it’s August and I’m standing in a coffee shop listening to the barista play this song off her phone that I listened to on a flight home for Christmas last year, and I made a pact to myself to only listen to this song in the Winter because it’s too melancholic for any other season, but she’s playing it now and I remembered that having connection to other people is the most interesting thing I can do while in this body. Nothing belongs to me and everything is sacred. Even in the house that I know and the room that I live in, it’s a glorified invisibility to realize everybody has the same autonomy as I do. Everything I love has been picked up and examined and chewed on and shoved in a back pocket and torn up and made anew again; how lucky I am to have my fingers on it even for a moment. Love is a renewable source that will find me over and over again - in friends and family and lovers, homemade meals and favorite ice creams and sitting under the clouds and talking to the moon, walking with no destination and writing with no audience, sharing books and clothes and stories and beds. Big meals made in small kitchens and finding wine I love and drinking wine I hate in the process. Letting people be curious about me and letting July be July and August be August. Knowing everything and pretending not to.

In moments of silence, between waves or songs or pauses in laughter to catch my breath, I find a specter of apprehension. A silent witness to all the times I was hardened by desire and hungry for something that did not belong to me. I used to take it all so personally, but this Summer is soft and welcoming and safe and I can taste without biting my tongue. I make sure now to leave space for the chaos, it’s synonymous with wonder and devotion and it always has been. I’m existing here knowing I would go back in time just to feel it all twice. But Summer is not something you can feel twice, never the same Summer, never the same July. So I take the long version when I can and I lean into every feeling I can and I accept that I should have brought my shoes on the beach with me and that I should have worn sunscreen and that the tarot card readers on tiktok live are not serious people, I just have a tendency of looking for an answer in everything. I understand I am not anomaly - I’m not the only girl who suffers from bouts of maladaptive daydreaming or embellishing moments I’ve only conjured up in my mind. But everything I’ve felt was very real and very unique and beautiful, because if summer has taught me anything it is that I can turn everything into something. An answer into a solution for a problem that never existed, a made-up scenario into something tangible and transformative, a cabinet of ingredients into something homemade and sweet. When Summer stretches out before me, full of longing and warmth and golden hues, I don’t make it promise to stay. It’s etched into my ribs deep enough this time that I’ll name the hunger a blessing.

I’ve turned the once empty and once daunting room into a space where love finds me in the way I perceive it. Where we linger and let warmth reach every corner and where every mess is joyous. I feast on it all - knowing that I came here with nothing and I will leave with memories of peeling oranges and morning showers and vacuuming and seeing the moon from my bedroom window, convincing myself of every cryptic message from the universe. This space, where I keep the blinds open, even at night and even when all my lights are on. I have this secret hope that people will catch glimpses - while they take out their trash at night or walk their dogs one final time in the unwavering nighttime heat - they will see me dancing or hear the music playing and they will see my candles lit and the way I’ve decorated my walls and they will see me doing mundane things, as well as exciting things like doubling over in laughter with my friends over something they wouldn’t understand. They will see me reading on my couch and putting things in my oven and they will hear squeals and giggles and endless oh my gods! over long awaited notifications and texts that I’ll re-read and re-analyze over badly-transcribed voice memos in the following weeks. They will see, and they will think about how much of a person I am and how I love and how I am loved, and they will know, from the glimpse inside my windows, that this Summer finally feels like the Summer I’m always waiting for.