“And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it’s this secret world… that exists right there… in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don’t have the ability to perceive them.” —Frances Ha
There is something ancient about August. The air, the conversations, the inner monologues, the sorrow. I remember once I discovered a used copy of Leaves of Grass. It was a Christmas gift exchanged by my parents. I flipped the pages, dog eared, warn, creased, yellowed by sun and time until I landed back at the start where I saw a note. A single annotation which my eyes glanced over and over following the trail of ink reading the words first to see what they said and then after to draw out the new and suddenly strange sense of time they evoked. I was inexplicably moved, not by love or realizing the note was written before I was born. No, it was a new feeling which now occurs anytime I am holding a book with someone else's handwriting.
It is an awareness of a circuit being made by two people who often do not know each other. To hold the paper in your hand, warp the pages, read the same words in the same ink, but with different eyes. I feel the overlap of life in this immensely. And it is both that suddenly too much is existing simultaneously, two people connected at the hands and eyes. But also, that this is made real only on the fact that this exact copy of the book, even smaller, these words are now in two places at once. Held in the eyes of the past holding the eyes of the present. To me, this is much the same as what I feel when I enter the month of August. This period transports me. I feel my multitudes collecting in my consciousness, settling somewhere I cannot see but understand to be my parent’s porch. Just after 4 o’clock their legs dangling off the edge, looking out at the lawn before its decay. If I close my eyes it’s like being there.
Why there? I have spent many waning summer afternoons in that exact position contemplating the time that has passed. August to me is ancient. The air, the conversations, the inner monologues, the sorrow. I recognize this month so easily, feel its arrival in trivial things. Finding that my mind naturally progresses to a kind of reworking that almost always happened in my adolescence and early twenties outside on those rough beams of wood marking the start of our house. Afternoons of profound understanding for the loss I was facing. The loss of my imagined selves. Taking inventory of what I’d hoped for in January to accept what has not quite come. The goals I made, the daydreams I thought were waiting here at the other half of the year.
This year, I feel I have become nothing.
The myriad of visions I had for my life were at varying levels of probability. I had hoped to have finished more chapters, to get a well-paying job, to pay my bills punctually, more money, more time, more readers, more visible attributes to building a life within my living day after day. Small and big things. Doable and sometimes impossible dreams that were nice to believe in because they were impossible. Yet none of those things arrived. In fact, nothing I had hoped for really did. Not for lack of trying, but still as a failure in a kind of way. Perhaps that is what loss really is. A failure to hold onto something, to keep it in your grasp even just your line of sight. I realized this in July. This feeling of failure frightened me.
Then August came.
I can’t really explain it. Perhaps you understand the way this month arrives like water spilled on a tablecloth. How it spreads slowly, seeping into the space around it. Starting first at night with windy caresses, then afternoons with clouded coverage, until one morning you wake up and it is more than the start of a new month, it has gathered at your ankles. My consciousness began to excuse itself to my parent’s porch first as a guest and then as a resident. I needed to go there, I needed to remember my past failings in order to articulate these ones. To minimize their impact and to accept them as they were, as August allows.
When I close my eyes it feels like showing up to a party that has already begun. There are past versions of me all around. A multitude of renditions. Women who remain imagined, women who arrived late, delayed, stuck in traffic having reworked their route here and arrived anyway. Women who had experienced August years ago who were me, who still are me. Each looking at themselves with distinct clarity and disappointment. We are all somehow thinking the same thing. I had hoped for so much more. Words which exist simultaneously in the past and the present. Like looking at an annotation only the circuit is made by the month itself, by time.
August is not a solution, but a comfort. Often comfort is enough to find a solution anyway. To recalibrate the mind so as to try for something even if you cannot achieve everything. I sit with the solitude of only being amongst yourselves and I listen to the sound of summer, which is fading quicker than I remember, and I look at what I wanted and where I am. There is a sudden jolt of remembering how. How to accept these versions of myself which will for now stay imaginary. But I realize here, each year, that I must work harder, move further and slower. The latter being the last thing to settle on me comfortably. There is a distinct self-awareness here, bravery, even civility which allows you to look directly into the heart of time to see where you have landed. Only in August do I have the mind to accept what I have not become. Everything here I have already felt before.
I have failed. I can say that now without being afraid. It is no longer July. There is a community here. I have that same strange feeling for time. I am connected to the past by thoughts alone. These words are in two places at once. Nothing here is new. This is a good thing.
Sometimes in August, I feel eyes on me. I don’t see anyone looking. I could be alone in my room or on the subway platform in the early afternoon but I feel someone around me. I close my eyes and revert to the porch, the invisible one that my conscious now lies in for 31 days. There is someone here, someone in the crowd of people who I had once been. One January she had dreamed and found in August failure. She is looking toward that dream. She is looking at me.
In some version of the past the person I am today was a figment, idyllic, a mythological concept. So to say, in some version somewhere, this present is not a failure, but the destination. How strange.
I’m not at the porch, but if I were, if I could really step outside and be there, I’d be thinking about the end of summer. I’d be looking out at that lawn and I’d watch some version of me. I don’t know how old she is, all I know is she has done what I had hoped for on late cold nights walking home. I’m sure she’ll tell me all about when she gets here. For now, time is moving slowly. Summer isn’t over yet. The traffic is still denser, the delays are still long. The end is coming but there’s a destination in there, a place to get to, and everyone must be taking 95. I suppose in some ways, so am I.
“I just want a humble, murderously simple thing: that a person be glad when I walk into the room.” On Love by Marina Tsvetaeva
“I realize now however it was not a crush like those that had happened in previous years. Ones where it made life interesting or moments where I was physically enamored. He was handsome but most of all he was very nice to me. I had forgotten men could be that way with me.” July 11th, 2022 11:51 PM
“And loss feels like failing. A failure to see it going. A failure to hold onto it. To do what you were supposed to.” July 14th, 2022 11:02 PM
I like to walk through this time with leisure. I like to listen to sad songs because suddenly they don’t feel so sad. Instead, they feel inevitable. Each dedicated to summer, to ourselves, to the mourning of failure and the loss of the warmth. Even if it’s still hot, to me, August marks the start of the end. You can’t help but notice it when the clouds skate across the sun or the way your tan seems to be a little less bright. I also too feel the deepest gratitude for all the earth gives. We talk so much of wanting warmth all she can do is deliver an intense version of it only to soften later. She’s burned herself out for us so I’m gonna stay with her until the end. Until that last leaf drops. Yes, love is the air.
August’s mood board is here! A vintage faded green and pink take on the ancient sorrow running through August. Not a failure but a delay. Not a month but a religion. Enjoy it while you can.
Next week paying subscribes get to continue on with failure in my piece The Bartender’s Kiss. About being recognized, getting your card declined, and being in a good bar at a bad time.
For 5$ you can tune in. Or you can simply do a free trial but I warn you it might make you want to subscribe.
If that’s not your thing, don’t worry about it. We’ll see each other somewhere groovy soon.
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 Starbucks Fridays, our failures, our delays
Love always,
Chloé