august might just be the low
The New York Times daily morning newsletter tells me that it’s high summer and I should therefore be meal prepping salmon to eat by the lake or the pool. This is something The New York Times daily morning newsletter seems to have wrong. A teeny error which wriggled past the summer intern editors hungover from the city and the full time permanent editors who abhor the sweaty summer ones.
Of course, August is not high summer. July is, July has a beat that drums through you incessantly. It peels back your sunburnt skin and forces you to roll up the car windows and blare the AC. July brings you, after a twelve hour shift at the restaurant with grease imprinted into every follicle of skin and hair, face to face with your ex in the preserved food aisle of the grocery store. July forces the burn of tequila and the bitter high school reunions and the bonfire smoke down your throat, forces you to look, really look, at this place that raised you and that you had the audacity to leave. July is brutal and panting and all out, and the grass is dry and the trees are imposing and everything is loud and deadly and drunk. July is the high of summer.
August, however, is for the reckoning. August is for buying new clothes at the thrift store in hope that you might get a two for one new personality along with the worn out jeans. August is unforgiving but like a loving aunt who expects more from you, who will still make you tea even after you’ve been a less than perfect being. In August you walk into your spare bedroom looking for a laundry basket and stay standing there in the doorway unmoving for three minutes remembering what it was like to have someone sleeping shirtless in your sheets. In August you walk downstairs after sobbing at 3am and sit at the kitchen counter with a cup of lukewarm water. The car windows stay down in August and you keep your hair out of your face and drive too fast. You call your friends from school and reduce the existential panic to boredom and a lack of distraction. In August you only get your hair cut one inch instead of two and smoke faded weed from a year old blunt.
July is the high of the summer, but August might just be the low.
Perhaps the city people don’t know that. How could they? The editors and the intern editors and the writers that crank out The New York Times daily morning newsletter. How could they? When they live in cement and cars and windows stacked upon windows dented by cubicles. They don’t know what it is like to be nineteen in your tiny town with peepers and owls and fresh air swirling through your screens. They don’t know August as it is raw.
The editors haven’t felt that it is muggy and humid and heavy but soft. Like jazz blues pouring out of the only bar in a seventy mile radius on a Thursday night. They haven’t seen the fireflies at the summertime’s close or been surrounded by trees so green they begin to think a belief in any other color is a silly thing indeed. In it’s true form, the eighth month is the low, the month where the thunder rolls and the rain pours, gently scrubbing, gently purging. It’s the last call, the flickering of the open sign, and the hostess standing up from the table to bring the wine glasses to the sink. August is the low thrum, the hum of something great pacing and pacing and turning and finally settling in.
