The Middle

What I didn't know last June

There always comes a point as summer takes shape that I find myself outside a restaurant alone. 

Always on the waterfront, always at the point in the evening where one-half of any party is squinting under the late sun as it begins to run parallel with our world into their eyes. Everything is warm, everything feels good, and for whatever reason there is a beauty to living that makes it all sad and I can’t say why. It's not even that the present moment is sad, but that as it goes by me, it seems to pass through a threshold of retrospect where it takes on a somber hue. Like I couldn’t know the truth until it was already over. Each June arrives and departs exactly the same. A meeting of ends, a strike, a slow film dissolve into July and suddenly I’m far away. Everything is terribly hot. I’m always in my apartment and never at home. 

Yet before all that I’m always in front of a restaurant. Women in their fine linen smile at the people in front of them. I’ll walk the water of Williamsburg, head turned impolitely, intrusive even to the moment I’m outside of. No one sees me, no one looks up and catches my eye. The entire dining room ablaze and with the scraping of silverware along the dishes, paired with the idle chatter, a kind of siren’s song is made. The trance is never quite broken, not to me, not as I get further away. I feel it, that always thing about June, like a knife in the gut. A pencil to the eye, twisting, sharpening making itself known to me. 

It sounds sad. The more I read it the sadder it sounds but it isn’t really. Not at least to me. Like I said, it seems the sorrowing is happening after the moment has passed, only as I reflect upon it. Somehow June exists only in the present with a kind of duality. It is entirely made for the happiness of the self, the going out of doors and facing the world which is fantastic and welcoming once more. It’s a kind of world you want to be a part of. Only to then later, with that sharp view it brings of real life, see the sadness it carried just the same. As if it were equally and entirely also made for that. 

The sadness seems to be about summer itself and all its promises which with growing up we learn are ultimately empty. The thing we can only know halfway through the year but also only know at the start of something. June is both these things, the start and the middle. An infinity, cutting its way through itself to start over. Cycling over and over again, always always always. 

Looking in on those tables beyond reach I must admit I don’t notice the big ones, full of friends. My desire is purely self-serving. I want to be adored, want to be glowing and fine in the way I know I am, and I want someone to see it. I want someone to say it out loud. Theres a longing for romance, for that simple and sweet beginning. The warmth before the heat.

I’m a dreamer by nature, an avoidant person, constantly exiting the real world as desire wells in my mouth and in my eyes. I might normally depart reality if I were caught outside a place I wanted to be in, but there the coin is, one side of it. It’s nice to be anywhere in June. I can never quite bring myself to depart in those early days of summer, not how I normally do even when my cravings feel obtrusive. It's not the time for that kind of thing. Even as that strange sadness sits adjacent and I feel the panic that summer and its heat are on the horizon, I stay where I am. Sit idle like the conversation, simmer like a pot of sauce on the stove. Red with the sun, rich in something, something without name, but certainly full in flavor. 

What I suppose is that June is a month somber in its own cyclical way. Somber meaning dull yes, but slow in quality, also more personally meaning an innately treasured or cherished moment. Something stagnant and meant to be examined, something dragged around for others to look at with you. A collective sorrow rooted in the deeply personal worldview of its carrier. I mean when June arrives it is almost impossible not to see the world as it is, to realize that you had been thinking things would happen one way only to feel spring and summer converge with a kind of clarity of mind. The kind of clarity that says you were entirely wrong about everything. 

Do you know why I don’t long for my friends when I see those restaurants? Because they are already here, because unlike all the other months I am not dragged away into my own fantasy, caught up in my longing. That duality indeed, to be both sad for what I want, but outstandingly happy and aware of what I already have. The long-standing plans, the dinners, the big tables that inevitably we will crowd around are being set. June is not made for delusion. That “always” is so carefully placed and I know it. We will meet just as we always do. The kind of nights where we always had different plans, but opted for more open and appreciative ones. Where the day is always too beautiful for our usual night in, where the sun suddenly is out too long to waste. We’ll set the table. We’ll sit in the blaze.

It’s June now and I’m sad again and I am wrong, about everything. I know this, I suspect this all the time but now I know where, about what. 

I used to think the love was the getting together, was the June of it all. That siren song of quiet dinners with glowing faces. And yes, maybe it’s part of it, maybe it’s the beginning, but remember June is also the middle. A figure eight, an infinite cycle of exposure and touching before arcing back out. We have known each other so long. Known each other long enough that they have seen me as human as I will ever be. They’ve seen me hungover and violently ill, with my hair slick on my face, with scabs on my legs, and sweat stains on my shirt. Any other time of year I might have to fight away the feeling of grotesque, but this June I feel profoundly moved. I understand love a little better because you love me, because I love you. 

And none of that will cease to exist when we reach July. Even when the AC isn’t strong, when we smell bad and our skin is slick and sticky we’ll probably walk shoulder to shoulder, our knuckles will brush each other’s hands. The world refracted has come into sharper view. Reality feels so much easier to bear because I love you.

So walking along the waterfront maybe the sadness was never about the thing I didn’t have, but what I couldn’t know. What I was missing all that time. That June will end and you will still have sweat stains and I will not find you disgusting, I will actually love your more fully for your humanity. It’s obvious now that I’ve seen it, but love is not very pretty, not in the middle. So what was I looking for in those restaurants anyway? What will I want this year now that I know this? I’ll tell you sometime soon maybe.

That’s for a later time though. For now, June is made for the radical real world. This is where the marrow of romance really is and it’s never what you think. Last June probably knew it was too late for me to see that, knew I missed the point, and knows now I’m still missing some points. I’m always wrong though so at least now I’m paying attention. The great love is here in the middle. I’ve said it before, at least I got one thing right. You can’t make the good stuff up.

May 26th, 2023 6:16 PM BT (before Taylor)

Mrs. S by K Patrick

“After John died, the world became very clear—as if a window had broken—the world itself became very dear. It was the place John had lived, and as long as I still walked around I could catch glimpses of him. But more than that, when John died I felt as if I had finally entered the larger community of humans. Now I knew unbearable grief, and I was like other people in this world who had known this. I began to understand that everything I knew and loved would pass away, and I would pass away. I would die like my brother had died, and the world, the actual “is-ness” of it became and remains very precious to me‚ the wind, running water, voices.” Marie Howe for BOMB Magazine.

All around me the world feels like it’s falling apart or breaking open, which is the same thing but I can’t tell. May 11th, 2023 4:35 PM

I try to imagine how it used to be before our lives primarily concerned unreal spaces. I am endlessly feeding the illusion. Always rewriting, always having something reoccur that ended too long ago. I keep the past so close I’m not sure it really exists anymore. May 5th, 2023 7:26 AM

If you’ve been here long enough you’ll recall that each June my friends and I gather for our annual summer solstice party. An event I can only describe as the pedestrian met gala. Where, the each of us, dress in something fine, something we’d wanted but had no use for, and make dinner and drink wine and watch the sun collapse under its longest arc toward the west side highway. We celebrate as many little things as we can think, the things that never warranted our getting dressed up to begin with, but are special in their own right. A junk drawer day, if the junk drawer was filled with pearls. I’ve been trying to think about what I would choose to celebrate. Maybe my book, which is give or take halfway finished, or maybe my new accolade of 5,000+ subscribers. It doesn’t feel right though, to choose that.

For June, I celebrate June. This month my friend will have a baby, and at the end of August, my other friend is moving away from New York. Some of my friends are engaged others are married. This is not a somber thing its not even bittersweet, its just good. Talking about anything like this though makes it seem that way. Regardless of how excited I am to knit little baby things or to attend my first wedding come September. You know me, I love the finality of something, the clear borders of a new time with all its possibility. When the sun sets on that fine June solstice I do suppose it will be my farewell. To celebrate the end of nothing but an age. A selfish age, a rotten one, this beautiful and divine time that we all had, more or less, together. To the new together, with all its new people. xoxo

Here is June’s mood board. I wanted to keep it colorful and light. Please don’t think this month as somber as it sounds here!

The paid newsletter is a more narrative exploration of each month’s theme. They all come with their own little goodies, a look at what I’ve been mulling over that month etc etc. 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

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Here’s to Starbucks Fridays, the beginning of things, and the perfect disgusting middle too

Love always,

Chloé