I hate summer
but what can you do
I hate summer. I feel constantly nauseous.
I have this new thing: the thought of savory foods in the morning makes me feel sick. Same goes for sweet shit in the afternoon.
The sun makes me sneeze sometimes.
(Even when it feels like it’s too hot to fucking move, the one thing I’ll always be able to do is complain.)
I go to a lot of parties and talk to people I barely know. It’s good, it’s new, but I feel ugly. Not ugly like a girl, but like an old, beaten dog who’s somehow stumbled into the room.
(Waiting for my rotting canines to pop up in the mirror.)
Most of all, I hate the change. The transformative beast rolls around. I was so proud when I came up with that. Now I don’t know, maybe the beast is me, and summer is just the catalyst.
Summer feels akin to lycanthropy.
I’m just mulling over phrases now.
Like, if to be loved is to be changed, then to be hurt is to be kept in place.
I haven’t stomached the last two or three or ten summers, they’ve barely scabbed over.
Someone says the wrong name at the dinner table and I can feel the grief settling into my bone marrow; it’s come to stay.
I used to be so committed to the performance of suffering. So proud of how good I was at it. Now I feel more and more indifferent, bored by my own theatrics. Maybe I just realized no one was watching but me and you can only keep an audience of one entertained for so long. Maybe I’m just not really suffering anymore (?)
Most days are quite good, I feel ambitious and confident. I really want to try new things, approach people in ways I’ve been too scared to.
Also, I’m so tired of hearing the interchangeable iterations of the essentially same sentence: It’s not fair, It’s not normal, It shouldn’t have been this way, It shouldn’t have happened, I/You/We didn’t deserve it.
It isn’t, It was, it did. No one deserves anything. And I don’t mean that in a nihilistic way. We don’t get things because we deserve them. We receive love because people love us and we get hurt because we do. No one is handing these things out based on a point system. (Sort of paraphrasing a Richard Siken tweet here.)
I finished reading The Secret History.
Who’s flying this plane?
Fucking nobody.
This summer, I’m trying to listen more. Enough with the introspective shit1, you know, I keep thinking about that Jemima Kirke IG story.
Before I even go there, I imagine myself writing the sentence “In a pub in Wales, a girl comes up to my table and says…”
I actually end up having all kinds of conversations with different people in that pub. One of them is a girl around my own age with long brown hair in a white mini skirt, who appears to be drunk off her ass. She throws her arms around me and starts giving me pet names. Over and over again she points at the guy who’s playing the guitar at the moment and says “Isn’t he good? That’s my boy. Well not really, but I love him.” The rest of the night, I see her striking up conversations with different people, talking to everyone as if they’re her best friend in the world. Somehow, it’s the most beautiful thing to me. Like I myself could go up to anyone there and go “See that girl over there? I love her.”
I come home and sleep in my friends’ beds again, and they in mine.
December was nine months ago. Fuck. I always let these things drag on for too long.
But then, the world from this particular car window looks the same. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe it always will.
I bump into my cowardice a lot, but we don’t come to any agreements, so there’s not much to tell.
My best friend, despite being the sunshine to my grump, is more stoic than I am. She is a good human, whatever that means. And she bears me when I’m not. I hope I do the same. I’m trying to no longer split the world into good people and myself. My best friend and I only recently started calling each other that. Maybe it felt too juvenile, maybe we’ve been witness to too many broken promises together. I don’t think she’s my soulmate. I don’t know how much we have in common. And she’s not my caretaker, not more than I am hers. She knows me. She explains me to me and when she does so, she is right.
With the colder weather come warmer times. My roommate and I watch two cats fight from the balcony. The brown one buckles up angrily, while the white one flops on its belly and blinks slowly, submissive but calm, as if to say, “I’ll do what you want as soon as you relax.”
I cook meals with pumpkin and sweet potato and we all sit around the table and eat them with a bottle of the sweet, cheap Italian wine in the yellow bottle that I put everybody on and that we still drink even though someone told us once it was “headache-wine”.
My emotions have dulled down over the summer, but it doesn’t feel like numbness, more like experience.
I can’t expect things to bruise up against me as much as they used to when they’ve been around so long. Maybe I did stop intellectualizing them because I don’t know how to write about them anymore. Sometimes I miss how real it all felt. Hurt made things important.
But important things can just exist. Maybe they don’t need to cut into you with every step you take.
My best friend says, “Do you remember when your therapy ended and said you didn’t know how you were supposed to get by without someone managing your emotions, and I told you eventually you’d be ok?”
3 Things I read & liked recently:
my mouth tastes dread but my tongue speaks love by
I’m Like Jack Kerouac But Instead Of Heroin It’s Red40 by
the discomfort is proof of life by
this is where I’m a lying liar in case it wasn’t obvious
Summer starts late June and ends late August