The light changed this week and nobody sent a memo.
I noticed it in the kitchen around six. The sun comes in lower now, thinner, at an angle that hits the wall instead of the floor. August light is a hammer, it comes straight down and means it. This light is more like a hand resting on the counter. Your body clocks it before your brain does. Something in your shoulders says oh and only later do you catch up and figure out what the oh was about.
Summer is leaving and there was no announcement. That’s the part that gets me every year. Big endings get announced. Funerals have dates. Jobs hand you a box and a last Friday. When you’re a kid the last day of school is a bell and a riot, everyone screaming, everyone in on it. Adults don’t get bells. The last cookout of the year happened three weeks ago and nobody knew it was the last one, so nobody stood up, nobody said anything. The coals just went out… see you never.
You find out about endings backwards. The last swim already happened, some afternoon in July you didn’t tag. The last night with the fan in the window already happened too, and you slept straight through it into September. You keep getting obituaries for things that died quietly in your own house, weeks ago, without you.
I think that’s why grown people get ambushed by grief at wierd times. You smell sunscreen in a drugstore in October and your chest goes tight over a month that’s already gone. It isn’t crazy. It’s unclaimed property. Small endings don’t get funerals so they pile up in you like unopened mail, and then one smell or one song opens the whole stack at once.
Every September when I was small somebody’s mother would say get your school shoes, and that was that, summer was over even though the thermometer still said summer. It was ugly but it was a ceremony. You knew where you stood. Kids get handed the ugly ceremonies and at least the calendar tells them the truth. Adults get nothing. You’re standing in the yard in shorts in late September feeling like a fool before you finally admit it on your own.
The fix I keep landing on is stupid simple and I feel ridiculous saying it. Announce them yourself. Decide. You’re allowed to walk outside on the first cool evening and say out loud, this was the last hot week, and pour the drink, and sit there, and be the witness for it. Naming a thing before it goes doesn’t stop it going. Nothing stops it going. But an ending you caught hurts like a cut. Clean, with edges. An ending you find out about in reverse hurts like a bruise, no outline, you can’t tell how big it is or how long it’s been there. The bruise ones take longer.
I don’t have a cleaner way to say that.
So that’s the plan this week. One night, the right night, I’m taking a drink outside and calling it. Saying this was the last hot day, it was good, some of it was even great, goodbye. September doesn’t knock, it just lets itself in. Fine. Then I’ll be the one who said it first.
Nobody has to answer. That was never the point. The point is the saying.