Summer's End

a delayed rumination on summer and why I miss it so

Beautiful bits and pieces of summer '24

It was a myopic summer. I couldn’t see how lucky I was, how quickly the mornings and afternoons and evenings spent in bed would fade from my memory. How it was always, eventually, suddenly, going to end. 

It’s hard, to recall every piece of it. I scroll through my camera roll to jog my memory, and I don’t fully recognize the version of myself reflected back at me. But the moments remain. Teaching a clove hitch knot with twine wrapped around a redwood tree, the salty brine of the surf at Moonlight Beach. It feels stupid to say that it was a summer of inactivity, because it wasn’t. I traveled the world, I worked, I saw my friends, I curled up on the couch with my mom. But things feel different than they are. And I didn’t feel like myself. No matter what routine I created or rituals I clung to, I couldn’t bend myself back into shape. I shed a lot of tears and missed college with an entirely unexpected voracity, given how much the hustle and bustle of academia grated on me throughout freshman year.

The highlight reel my phone provides, those memories are as good as any. They’re untarnished by their chronological neighbors. If I could, I’d curl up in them and take a nap. The warm front seat of Peyton’s car, Silver Springs blasting with the windows down. Up on Calton Hill with the Scottish wind blowing, a bruise blooming on my knee. Giggling at my sister as she draped herself over the foot of my bed. My nose pressed against the glass in Monterey, watching the moon jellies dance. I’d live in the dreamscape of my reality. And what a joke, that all that pain and stagnation refracts in my memory as pure joy and contentment. Maybe that’s all it takes—some narrative distance. 

But still, even so, when I remember summer, I don’t know what I was thinking, hating it so much. It was always going to end and I was always going to miss it when it was gone. It was always going to be autumn in Santa Cruz, and I was always going to be alright.