I don't think I like summer anymore...

It's too damn hot tbh.

When I was seven, the summer heat never stuck to my skin the way it does now. I don’t remember praying for a breeze the way I do now, sitting inside the way I do now. All I remember is that it was beautiful, that I was free, and that I felt undoubtedly of this earth. Back then, the trees in the backyard swayed and whispered when they did, and the sun danced across my face — my cheeks, my eyelashes, my nose, the curls on my forehead. Crouched over the roots of an ancient oak, watching ants trek back to the mound of their home, I felt like the light was holding me. I knew the light was holding me. My hands, plump with youth and lacking in worry, were often in the earth, my tiny fingers tracing the cracks in the dirt until a fault line gave way, plunging my palms deeper into the ground. The clouds still made shapes then and the sky was always blue. And when it wasn’t, when July rains and midwest thunder came spilling out, we rode our bikes in the downpour until our shaking bodies sent us home.

The world was so big, and I was so small, but I never even noticed. Everything just felt like it belonged to me and I belonged to it — the grass, the mud, the trees, the cold sidewalk after sunset. At dusk, the cicadas sang from the leaves and the parents on our block brought lawn chairs out to watch us extinguish what was left of that day. Time didn’t feel like it was passing, I only saw that it did. I didn’t know that each afternoon that spilled into night meant I was getting older. Meant I’d soon feel all the unrest that saddles up with the seasons.

Somewhere within the years, ones that seem to come at me faster and faster, all that splendor fell away. I stopped finding meaning in the sky, in fact, I stopped looking up all together, and the earth I used to mush and mash in my fists became little more than dirt under my feet. Most tragically, the summer light, the one that felt like kin, dulled. I’ve been trying to find it again. The past, even the bit that hurts, is a comfort. A memory is always the same, no matter how many times you turn it over in your hands, in your mind. Wouldn’t you go back if you could, even just for a little? Just to see if everything looks the same through different eyes? To hold your mother’s hand crossing the street? Run to the door when you hear dad’s Suzuki sputter home from work? Give your first cat a scratch on the chin? Cry when he dies?

Maybe it’s a vice. Maybe I am weak. Maybe I’m feeble-minded, unable to handle the realities of adulthood in the modern day. Maybe I just miss nature and getting dirty and my freedom and sitting at the dining room table, bored and restless, in the middle of August and my mom braiding my hair and the Seventeen magazine posters peeling off my wall and the secret knock the kids in our neighborhood used and Baskin Robbins and the yellow slide at the pool and pizza dipped in Dorothy Lynch and Gilmore Girls on at 4 p.m. and crying when I felt like it and Shrek 2 on the Gameboy and the ice cream truck and lemonade powder by the spoonful and listening to Hilary Duff on my portable CD player at Pizza Street.

Yesterday felt like the first day of summer, was the first day of summer. Those with means left the city behind, left us to be her keeper. I wandered around my part of New York. I sat on a bench. I read a book. I drank a watery coffee. I missed home. I thought about leaving too — about driving out of the city, to some beach. I thought about lying there, about letting the sun melt me, the sand erode me. I thought about sea glass, about how nice it must feel to let the ocean rock you back and forth like that, foamy and soft, along its coast. I used to think of summer that way: lulling and gentle. I’d like to try and do so again.

Thanks for letting me be melodramatic. Let’s pretend that never happened and move on.

Consumption Junction:

Objects, thoughts, media.

• A televised genocide continues to unfold in Gaza, the occupation continues to annex and destroy the West Bank and my heart just ruptures and explodes and then weakly fumbles itself back together every day watching it unfold. What Gazans are enduring now, no human on earth should have to endure. How free is our country if we can’t get our “leaders” to listen when we say stop the genocide, when we say no more wars, when we say leave migrants alone. Giving up and burning out is not an option. Our lives are far too cushy to do that. We have to keep pushing for an end to the genocide, an end to the occupation and a free Palestine. In the meantime, donate to Healing Our Homeland who does amazing grassroots work in Gaza.

• A lot of flip phone content… more on this later…

  

• I bought a Sony cx240 camcorder and I love her sooo much. I documented the spring and beginning of summer. Maybe I’ll show you guys. I’ve been editing on iMovie (lol) but if anyone has a better free recommendation (maybe CapCut), I’m all ears.

• Voted today. Ranked Zohran, did NOT rank Cuomo. A deliciously fun fact is that my beautiful and smart friend

  Tara Maria Gonzalez
  beat Zohran out for class president when they were at Bronx Science together. She just endorsed him for mayor but maybe we can band together and convince Tara to run someday??? She’ll be the first woman in office to wear Simone Rocha. Inspiring.

  

• I’m very into pedicures right now, not even in a weird feet-y way. I feel like someone who doesn’t neglect themselves when I’ve got polished toes, you know?

• Just finally finished reading Martyr! (apt timing I suppose) and I’m processing. There’s no doubt it’s a brilliant book written by a brilliant author. But I’m processing. I’m reading The Bell Jar next lmao.

• Like everyone else, I’ve been obsessively reading

  Casey Lewis
  ’s newsletter every day. 1. scrumptious stuff. 2. I’m trying (and failing) to be on my phone less, and Casey’s newsletter is a partial antidote to the doomscroll.

• This piece from

  Carmen Maria Machado
  on writing/publishing/ego vs. survival had me hollering internally as I came out of a migraine.

• Finally: