My Brother's Cicadas

observations on summer

The summer my brother was 17 bugs bloomed from the ground. 

“These cicadas,” My grandmother said, “were born the same year your brother was born.”

I was ten and though the sound was familiar I thought she meant something else from the way she spoke. I thought Keil had been born at precisely the right time, the one year where he could say such things. The rest of us too late. The rest of us too early. I thought this was an anomaly. To me it felt like he was, he was my brother, he was perhaps the closest anomaly I’d ever experienced. It made all the sense in the world that this would happen, that this world was his world, these cicadas, his cicadas, rising up to the trees to sing, to tell us they came into living with him. And for that reason, every heat-packed day, where the thick world crowds in through the windows, when the streets themselves are clogged and hard to pass through, I hear those first-time speakers, those soil-born singers, and think of my brother.

Summer is not my friend. In its presence, I am always sobbing. I don’t like how it makes me feel. I don’t like that it traps me in everything, every hot room, every humid day, every sweaty limb, and the too-small too too-tight clothes. I don’t like what it forces me to do, to reveal skin without asking, without letting me decide if I want to. The circumstances I can do nothing about besides wait for them to be over, wait for the sun to set, for the respite of violence—thunder that shakes the windows before the brief downpour. 

But I wrote once, of summer, that my life was going to be good. I wrote, I won’t this summer believe that old story about my misery. There is a past where summer sits idle and free. I know in memory there is an endless childhood where the season sits warm like a promise. If only I remember it, if only I looked at it a different way. And so I think now about the truth. 

How I love a downpour. 

Those rains that happen only in summer where a sheet of night falls over the sky briefly. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen clouds so dark as those ones from an incoming front, the ones after a few days heat and the wind with delayed gratification sweeps across the city and the lawn with sudden dramatic chill. As if the air had been turned on but I never had an air conditioner growing up. So we’d have to rise from our place on the couch and move toward the window. More we’d have to go into it, leave the house—my dad would go out onto our porch and half touching danger, letting our feet touch the spray of the storm, we’d watch for light. Those skeletal cracks across the clouds which at times came too slow as if wanting us to see them. Only for it to end with a certain disappointment, climbing back in from where we came. The air inside sticky and hot like it hadn’t happened at all. Never enough time for it to have happened at all. 

When it doesn’t rain I still love the world and the things only summer can give. The endless chatter and its forgiving quiet, smoothing over the ripples of conversation and connection like iron on linen. How at 19 I began to walk as spring warmed and the relief I found in the noise of other people. How it reminded me of home, the interminable croak of frogs and bugs from the woods behind the house. I’d stand in the street wading as if swimming through deep water in Long Island Sound where I grew up, carefully avoiding what was coming up from the bottom, reeds of seaweed and jellyfish, to remind myself I was not here alone, to remind myself I would make it out of New York alive. I’d wait there a while, listening to young somethings sit in their groups which I had not yet found but would have later, and feel the future before me. But now that is the past in its own way and I did find a group and every spring I remind myself that I’ve made it here alive. Because of them, because most any night of the week we are out on the streets once it's warm enough, laughing like children, but no longer children. 

I climb the stairs down to the subway after and walk through my quiet neighborhood the way I would at home with my parents. Dinner already had, the people indoors with their silverware clattered. All that once seemed endless halted and the quiet is still and loaded with energy and I think maybe there is nothing in the world I love more than where I’m at, than home waiting up ahead, than the warmth of the world sticking to my arms, than this season.  

We learn in nonfiction writing that truth and fact are not always the same thing. That something can be true and not necessarily fact and we can write it and we won’t have necessarily lied—without guilt and within reason. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. What can be true this year that wasn’t fact last year? What is in my memory that might allude to happiness? I think that this summer doesn’t have to be what I remember. If I think about it long enough it seems almost true. If I focus my eyes just right my favorite things exist in these months. I’m saying I love you summer. 

I love you most notably from the sea. That which only you give me access to in the way that I would like—from within. It never feels right to be before you without being able to go in. I don’t remember learning to swim but I must’ve. I can imagine it, my mother and father in the shallows holding my hands as I clung to their warm body, the slow expanse, the chasm of trust growing until one final finger let go. Until I knew what I could never not know. 

The raft, as we call it at home, way out on the smooth sound. Sometimes a grown-up would come with us and it always seemed we were showing them a new world ruled by childhood. We’d lay along the black dock until it warmed us so that we had to fling ourselves in, adults following the rules we’d set up on instinct and tradition. Out there where we learned to dive, out there where we’d plunge to the bottom and feel the stony bottom, grabbing shells with our toes. It all was very dark and deep then, even as we grew up and the tide went out. And sometimes it was so impossible to go in knowing that we’d never get to go back, knowing that summer was over. There was nothing in those days so severe a punishment as the coming of fall. The reeling in of freedom, of those places that belonged to us. Even still the knowledge that so much of the world is becoming inaccessible makes me feel like crying. 

Time is passing. The season gone again and I would like to enjoy it this time. 

One year, the year I needed summer most, my father and I swam out on the evening empty waters to this raft. No one else came with us and it was a bad time for me then. I didn’t want to go back to New York even though summer had long since stopped being kind. But we swam and swam for what felt like hours until we reached the black dock and it had been years since I’d been there but I felt immediately that this place had no longer belonged to me. I was not a child, I was an intruder. But there with my father, yes I was a kid, his kid, I remembered how to be that and we sat out there a long time. I don’t know what we talked about, probably everything. It's interesting really, what you can remember. I know that year I was so sad. I believe also that to be one of the greatest summers I ever had. Hm. 

You know, you can survive on beliefs that aren’t true but make your world a little better without hurting anyone in the process. The lightning is slowing so we can watch it, the moon is following our car, I will have the place in this world I long for. Every cicada is my brother’s cicada even if we are no longer 17 and 10, living in the same place, rising to the humidity through an open window and sitting on the couch as the bugs sing. But sometimes, when I listen, it's like we are. Those vibrant years, those young thoughts, when summer was so dear, a long-lost friend. 

Mohammed El-Kurd, from Rifqa; “Rifqa”

“Everybody has experienced the defeat of their lives. Nobody has a life that worked out the way they wanted it to work out. We all begin as the hero of our own dramas, in center stage, and inevitably life moves us out of center stage, defeats the hero, overturns the plot and the strategy and we’re left on the sidelines, wondering why we no longer have a part, or want a part, in the whole damn thing. So everybody’s experienced this. When it’s presented to us sweetly, the feeling goes from heart to heart and we feel less isolated and we feel part of the great human chain, which is really involved with the recognition of defeat.” Leonard Cohen on why people enjoy listening to melancholy songs. From a BBC radio interview in 2007

When will my absence bother you? I had this dream that eventually he would. That eventually there would be a hole where I’d been that he would run his fingers over absently, but it never came. The dream is over. June 2nd, 2024 5:24 PM

I knew we’d never have this time again. We would never be twenty-five, but we would also never have as much of it. One of us would always have some place else to get back to, some suitcase to pack, someone waiting. And there would always be too much to say and so much forgotten, long stretches where those little stories we used to tell over weekly dinner wouldn’t be said. May 28th, 2024 1:13 AM

Every year my friends and I throw a solstice celebration. Its a junk drawer event. We toss in all the little accomplishments, things we didn’t really need to celebrate or make much noise about, and we buy those dresses and shoes we had no reason to really buy, and we dance along the river or on a roof until the longest day of the year passes by. This year I’m working, but I’ll tell you what I’m celebrating.

1. All the work I did on my manuscript with my editor Kyla in April

2. My new job

3. 10,000 newsletter subscribers (manifesting/I’m basically there.)

4. The new friends I’ve made this year

5. The old friends I’ve kept

6. All the trying I’ve done

7. Rest I’ve allowed myself to take

8. responsibly switching to water at the afterparty of Grace and Mike’s wedding

9. Finishing two books the last week of May

10. Recovering from the first six months of this year

Spring housekeeping before summer has arrived:

I know this year you’ve given me a lot of leeway, we’ve done some funky newsletters. Some were unfinished, others short, many of them late, and all of it has been done with the hopes that by the end of the summer, I will have my manuscript. I have an August-ish deadline as of right now that I am quite literally ripping my hair out to meet. So, this summer is going to look a littttllleee different. Here’s what you need to know!

1. I’m going to be pausing billing on my paid newsletter for July and August as I will not be making any paid content. (New subscribers will not be able to purchase a subscription while old subscribers will not be charged. You’ll still have access to my archive though!)

2. July will be, again, a gratitude list and August is TBD!

I’m trying to free up a little time and relieve a little creative pressure so I can hunker down and get what I need to get done done! That means for you all that I will simply have more goodies in the newsletter instead of a long-form piece.

I’m sorry that when times get tough this is the first thing I am able to sacrifice. I wish that I could be better about it, give more time, write better pieces, but my life is a little out of my control and this is the most in-control thing I have. So if you can humor me and forgive me I like to think it’s a sweet deal in the end. We both get books out of it.

But you know I always come back. And you know I’m always here.

So we’ll be seeing each other but in a different way.

Thank you for everything you give. I hope I can give just as much soon!

Here is this month’s mood board! Enjoy the breezy summer vibes.

That’s all this month! If you enjoyed the little conversation we had let me know! Save, share, and tag @chloeinletters

Here is My Twitter and my Instagram is @chloeinletters  where the DMs are checked, cared, and loved for.

My Goodreads where I sometimes write reviews but keep updated is right here where more of my library is contained as far as books go. 

My website is where you can check out my portfolio and contact me 

My email, if you want to cut to the chase, is letterstochloew@gmail.com where you can let me know what you think or ask me a question about what you saw here! 

Here’s to coffee Fridays, singing cicadas, childhood, and finishing a book

Love always,

Chloé