Now until September is the longest Wednesday afternoon. August is ugly and tired. A exhausted month that lulls you into paralysis. You don’t move through August, you submit to its sweaty grip. August is a hot nap, the kind you wake from feeling like God has abandoned you. When August is over, though, I miss it, which makes it worse. Yesterday I was thinking about being a kid and waiting for the new school year to begin. I knew I would be disappointed by it, but still held out some gorgeous hope that it would be wonderful.
Like when I arranged a group lunch at a bagel place after the first day of middle school, with kids I had gone through elementary school with. I felt, for the first time, like I had led something. I had been a social glue. Instead, I had to run into the restroom to blot my armpits with a hard wound paper towel because a girl whose parents were friends with my parents pointed out that I had pit stains on my short sleeve button down shirt. This was all in front of a boy I had held hands with under a foosball table at a sleepover birthday party. Staring at myself in the mirror in florescent restroom light, I dragged the paper against my pit flesh and felt like I was forty-seven years old. I figured the only thing left to do was to skip town and change my identity. I didn’t run away and start my life over. I stayed and kept on. Each year, I hoped it would be different but I knew it wouldn’t. Every day was split between fear and boredom.
There was a kind of certainty in September that I could appreciate. I could respect it. A month of fundamentals. I could depend on September being weird and embarrassing and deeply funny, even in the worst moments. Like in the second full week of sixth grade, when my math teacher pulled me aside after class to ask me if I’d been drinking, only for both of us to discover a bag of smushed grapes I’d forgotten about had fermented into wine at the bottom of my backpack. Or the day my grandmother died—the last Monday during my first month of freshman year—my sister accidentally backed her Jeep onto my calf in front of school before she went to park in the senior lot. I was stuck and screaming—my voice not yet dropped—while people entered the building. Some laughed and pointed, but mostly everyone simply stared with no feeling at all before carrying on with their lives. My homeroom teacher approached me later to tell me she heard me crying outside and to asked if everything was OK at home.
And two years earlier, on 9/11, both my parents came to take me out of school to go to the orthodontist. There I saw a kid from my class in the waiting room, who inexplicably had a southern twang, even though we lived in New Jersey. He didn’t acknowledge me, but I watched him get out of his chair and kneel down by the radio to listen to a reporter rattle off descriptions of the first tower falling. He had his hand on his chin like he was thinking; an unconscious display of theatrical, wartime stoicism. I didn’t know what camp was yet, but I knew this was it.
I also knew it was camp when a few months later, my geography teacher led a class assembly in the gym to honor the dead, but in reality was just us listening to “I Hope You Dance” by Lee Ann Womack in silence. The teacher—flanked by a few other members of the 7th grade faculty, and our assistant principal who months later would be banging on my math classroom door during our very first lockdown drill—asked if anyone had any feelings they wanted to share. No one did. They dismissed us for lunch, and I don’t think anyone ever mentioned it again. Too humiliating for all involved, I guess.
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I keep getting Instagram ads for things my husband and I have only talked about aloud, not in text. It should scare me more than it does. AI singularity won’t result in humanity’s extinction, it’ll result in knowing when you want new window blinds, even before you do. There are scarier things happening in the world right now. There are still three weeks left in August.
"an unconscious display of theatrical, wartime stoicism. I didn’t know what camp was yet, but I knew this was it." Man, that's gorgeous. Write a novel.