Dog Days Are Over
A love letter to August and a reckoning with endings — on seasons changing, summers that save you, and the strange electricity of being in-between.
I cannot be the only one that feels a peculiar yet familiar tightness in my chest every time our dear July is eclipsed by its strange and rather sneaky successor, August. We know she's coming, and yet, somehow, she spooks us even still, with her random gusts of chilly air, suddenly crowded calendar spaces, and a bittersweet goodbye to the summer season. She is the out-of-place month, the number five, that one word on the tip of your tongue, a Sunday afternoon, that "je ne sais quoi" feeling we get sometimes. Call her what you want, but the fact remains: I blinked twice and she is nearly out the door already, with last night's skirt and kitten heels in tow.
And you know what? For the first time in years, I feel rather melancholy about parting with her upbeat neighbors: the sunny months. Historically, I never liked these "dog days" everyone seemed so attached to. For me, it always meant boredom and bikini wedgies and sweat-induced-acne and longing and body dysmorphia and the occasional, excruciating heart break.
No thanks.
This summer was different. It was the end of everything and the start of something I have yet to understand. It was an introduction to the East Coast and all of its sweet spots. Disco-drenched dancing in New York City. Sea salt soaked surfing and lightning quick love affairs in the Hamptons. The long, winding back roads of Connecticut, with its horse stables and apple orchards and overpriced wine lists. I think the haute and heavy art scene woven into the fabric of these spaces nearly saved me or infuriated me (I still can't tell). It was the fragmented parts of me slowly melting back together in a foreign and healing fashion, for the hundredth time. It was taking myself seriously again. It was fresh tomatoes and mozzarella and basil and that fancy salt everyone has these days. It was promising myself I'll never speak his name again unnecessarily. It was sun bathing turned meditation. It was long train rides and creative confusion and allowing myself to sing freely and passionately in the kitchen, liked I used to. This summer was everything.
And so, yes, August came both quickly and clunkily this year. As we speak, she is hurriedly trading out the lingering smell of sea breeze and hydrangeas and bergamot for the unmistakably warm welcome of firewood and cinnamon and earthy pine. Enter, September and chest tightness. Perhaps this perplexing, midway feeling that I, and many others, carry is just a classic cocktail of anticipation for the new season mixed with a dash of slight dread towards the awkward holidays ahead? Unsurprisingly, Sylvia Plath sums it up best:
"August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd, uneven time."
Something in me cannot help but wonder… perhaps it's something more this year around? Maybe this strange, transitory feeling is the ticket every soul has to get stamped while aboard the passage through time. Maybe this is the mark of being twenty-four (an odd and in-between age anyways). Maybe this is the beginning of a large, cosmic shift that neither you or I could have ever dreamt up in our most wild and wonderful dreams?
Or maybe I start my period next week. Only time will tell.
Whatever it is, I feel it, and I am hoping this shift in the seasons and my soul is the catalyst for something really remarkable. You bet your lucky stars I am hoping this for you too, wherever you are in the world, sweet reader. Whether your summer was sweet or sad or sexy or all of the above, I'm thinking the best we can do is move forward bravely and welcome the transformative power that a new season can bring, yeah? After all, those summer flings alwaysss have a way of coming back around.
So I guess it's about time to say Au Revoir, August. May we all approach the coming months with grace and messiness, curiosity and determinism, and the badassery that being in your twenties so often requires.