ode to august
When the eighth month of the year rolls around, a panic-induced melancholy sets in. It seems as though August is filled with feelings rather than days, especially that of finality. As the over-saturated images on Pinterest say, it’s “the Sunday of Summer.”
I’m a week away from my last first day of school. After this, the stretch of leisure lasting from May to the end of August won’t be cushioned by the start of a new semester. It’s cliche, yes, but so many people have told me that my last year of undergrad would go by faster than I thought. They weren’t kidding. The end is in sight. But the reality of this isn’t as paralyzing as it was months ago. I spent a good chunk of this year being controlled by fear—the fear of not knowing where my life is going to be in a few months, the fear of not knowing who I’m going to be after college. And so I tried to create more structure, more rules. These rules dictated my feelings, my free time, my thoughts, and resulted in me distancing myself from potential bliss. This summer has been a blur of faces and names and so much more. There are things I want to preserve and things I’d like to erase. Oddly enough I’ve been thinking about how Rory Gilmore turned down Logan’s proposal at her college graduation party, for the sole reason that she liked how her life could sprawl out in multiple directions.
A couple of weeks ago, one of my favorite bands, Beach House, came to the Agora. My eyes were closed for most of the show. I was so tired, pressed up against the jean jacket of my now-boyfriend. My body felt hollow, like a tunnel, and the music was running through it like a current. When one of my favorite songs, “Myth,” came on, I let out a shriek of pure joy. The room was filled with smoke and muted neon lights coming from the stage. I was wrapped in color and sound. Everyone was singing the chorus “Help me to name it, help me to name it.”
Help me to name it. Last month I wrote a poem that was the first thing that felt like me in a long time. It’s longer, too. The last part of the first stanza is “Is there a word for being moved by everything? / I’ll let you know when I find it.” I read the poem in its entirety for the first time at an open mic last week, looking up from the page of my stained notebook every few words or so. I wore a cream colored blouse and pants, perhaps to absorb everything else around me, the way I did at the Beach House show. Now that I think about it, I don’t know if I’ll ever find a word for being moved by everything. It’s like Marina Keegan and her wanting to find the word for the opposite of loneliness. It’s a collection of things—nouns, feelings— that can’t possibly fit into one arrangement of vowels and consonants.
The poets (Mary Oliver, Edna St. Vincent Millay, etc) have fixated on August and its reputation as an “in-between” month. The time that exists between summer and fall, the transition from Leo to Virgo season, the time that lurches us forward against our will when we want to stay in the present, not face what looms ahead from September onwards. I’m still lodged between academia and real life, but that’s going to change too. I can’t deny that.
There are a lot of things I’m going to miss about this summer. Watching the sky bleed out into yellow, orange, and pink as the sun kisses Lake Erie. The smell of sunscreen in my hair and on my clothes. The eerie grey light that fills my apartment during a storm. Midi dresses and sandals. Mango tacos at my mom’s on the Fourth of July. Going to a salon before work and walking out four inches of hair lighter. My Grandma’s first Lyft ride. Picking lavender on my walks home. Reading my writing in a barn forty-five minutes from home, my dress sticking to my back. Singing “Truth Hurts” by Lizzo with Arbela on karaoke and having the whole bar sing along with us. Going to the library to bask in the air conditioning. Post-shift red bell pepper margaritas. Catching up on “Sweetbitter” on Monday nights. The glow cast on my street from the evening sun. Et cetera, et cetera. But there’s also a separate language that comes with summer which can only be translated through the senses. When words fail us we turn to touch, to smell, to sight, to taste, sounds that are only audible at certain hours of the day.
Who’s to say that we’ll only experience joy in the summer? We can’t frantically cram everything into thirty-one days of August when we still have four months left of the year. Let’s make the most of them, because that’s all that exists—how we fill them.