Early Summer Musings

Originally posted June 7th 2023

To me, summer is standing in the middle of a parking lot, the heat not coming from the sun but the ground. It’s being blasted with aircon the moment I step into a shop. Going to the cinema to avoid the heat, bringing a jumper because it’s always too cold inside. It’s laying on the sofa, sweating, drained of energy. It’s dunking my feet in cold water because they’re overheating. Summer is a slow, radiating pulse.

I’ve never been a summer person, but I try to think of the good times I’ve had. I met my best friend of nearly a decade in summer, I moved to London, I graduated university and went to my first and only monster truck rally. Summer, unlike winter, does not need big holidays to be appreciated. Summer is small moments, sat in the park, sitting outside the pub, music festivals, being outside! outside! outside! I’m preparing for my first 4th of July in 10 years, thinking of ways to take advantage of my time here.

When I moved back to the states, it was with the mentality that I was going to leave as soon as possible. I had spent the summer with my parents in Spain, fully intending on going back to London, a place I felt I had been swept off from. I have been for the last year in a haze, a frozen state as the world and my loved ones moved on. By the time I left London most of my friends had already left too, now most of them are gone. Scattered across the planet. I feel as though everyone has moved on but me. The close friendships of convenience gone. Who am I now?

Thinking about what to do for 4th of July is me trying to accept my circumstances, which, all in all, aren’t too bad. It’s still very lonely, given my “ailments” I haven’t made any new friends. But I want to stop thinking about going back to whatever idea I had of myself, of who I was, because honestly, I was a miserable little sod. I’m trying to imagine a future for myself, one that doesn’t rely on regression. I have small goals and big goals. Smalls goals like going to the grocery shop by myself, big goals like opening my own bookshop. Maybe I don’t have to be someone who hates the summer. Maybe I can find things to like? Could I be someone who walks into the heat and feels relief?

Perhaps my lack of summer nostalgia can be useful, everything is new. I’m going to listen to a lot of Gillian Welch and try to learn guitar (my fingers still don’t move quite right), continue my quest of watching so so many movies (maybe I’ll even go to the cinema???), read the classics, read the contemporaries, play records loud. I want to embrace rather than wait it out. I want to “put myself out there”. I haven’t been on a date in years so I think my first New York summer is the perfect time to break the streak. It’s time for fun, time to scare the shit out of myself, time to be so very cliché. Gonna do what that Eat Pray Love lady did (I haven’t read the book or seen the movie but I think I get it). I am so bored being stuck and sad!

It’s Finish the Novel Summer, it’s First Date Summer, it’s Paint More Summer, it’s Solo Grocery Store Trip Summer. I want to go on a road trip, I want to go to California and see my best friend. I want to not be so god damn anxious. Because, again, it’s so boring. The internet is boring, my apartment is boring, this lack of social life is boring. I’ve got to find my people. They’re out there somewhere waiting for me to join them. I’ll get into astrology, I don’t care.

(After the first draft, I went to the grocery shop by myself)

I’ve been thinking about how a lot of writers reflect on their childhoods. How clear and precise everything is, how they convey the feeling. It’s not bicycles and groups of friends (basically, no ones childhood was Stranger Things). It’s the feeling of bark before the branch gives way and you break your arm. Breaking a bone was like a rite of passage, I remember seeing a friend fall from a tree, the sound of a crack. He was quiet after the thud. His voice was low, as if he’d been knocked into adolescence. “Get Miss. *******”. I remember the silence after anyone got hurt, we’d be waiting for the cry or for them to brush off their knees and we’d go back to running. Childhood was a lot of watching kids get hurt, wrestling, slipped knives, concussions, etc. I remember being jealous of friends who got stitches. I’m not sure what the psychology is, why getting hurt was so much status. Even as a teen, playing Quarters, a game where you spin a quarter and the person across from you has to get it to spin the other way, whoever knocks it over then gets it jammed into their knuckles. It sounds very dramatic to say pain and childhood go hand in hand, but even the most quaint childhoods are full of it. All sensation is new, so pain seems more impactful, growing pains, losing teeth, ripping plasters off, the burning sensation of scrapped palms. While now we spend our days complaining about our backs whilst do little about it. Pain seems more dull and quiet.

I don’t really remember what it was like to be 12, I couldn’t tell you a single memory from that age and be confident that I was in fact 12. Everything is pressed together. I think about my primary feeling during childhood, all the way up to 18, which was anger. I don’t think I had a particularly happy or unhappy childhood, it was pretty mild if I’m being honest, but I remember being very angry. I was an angry toddler and kept it up until I, as cliché as it seems, started reading at 18. When I got really reading, I stopped being so angry about everything. Also my life had changed quite drastically by then. I was no longer a kid in the suburbs of California but a teenager/adult in the midlands of Ireland studying for exams that I hadn’t even heard of until a year before I began preparing for them. Once in Ireland my memory starts to clear, I can remember being 18 easily. I know how she felt, who her friends were, what she thought about day to day and what her dreams were. My childhood self on the other hand is a stranger to me. I don’t feel a strong connection to her and I don’t know if that’s what meant to happen. In a way, I feel like I was never a child. I just showed up at 18 and have been trying to adjust ever since. And it feels like because of this, everyone else had a head start, they had a whole childhood to prepare for the world. I often wonder if all my childhood memories are stolen from someone else. That I never saw my friend fall, did I even hear the break? I never saw J*****’s palm split open carving an apple. The rock never hit I*****’s temple. But I still have a scar on my knuckle from playing quarters, so there’s some proof. Perhaps that’s why we were so keen to get hurt, because it would later be evidence that we do in fact exist beyond our own memory. A lingering development of object permanence.

Thanks for reading,

-Enya xx