Pierre-Auguste Renoir
We were not martyrs because we kept our word. We were not special because we were serious people.
I kept writing about that summer because it was never ending - the confusion, the emptiness, the baby steps of courage and big withdrawals of restraint. Everything needed justifications, gut approvals, slow movement, overthinking. What was that Didion quote? I was writing because it was something to do.
That summer felt like that. This is that summer.
For what it is worth, I am not a serious person and when the ideas don’t arrive I write half legible paragraphs to my situationships and take selfies to post on twitter. I drink protein shakes with heart shaped ice and put up fairy lights in my bedroom and watch tiktoks on instagram. This is the truth - we are all teenagers before we are philosophers.
It also felt like everyone was always making up and breaking up with someone.
I was listening to 1989 like a broken record, and then to Olivia Rodrigo’s cover of You’re so Vain, and all the boys seemed like bad boys and what had ever been wrong with that?
Sometimes, under the beige lights of independence and youth and singlehood, the glimmer of hope shined so bright that everything was not only possible, everything did happen. I fell for a boy again, and wrote about it. I visited grownup friends who live wonderful, free lives. I got back into lifting and it felt like I could breathe my own breath. I was saving up, and getting icloud, and eating salted cucumbers and nacho salads. I was looking for tickets to Europe.
These were the late 20s, and this was how we would remember them: unedited, slow, lost, having fun, and how no one knew our names. No one knew our name and we kept being. I felt a hunger for things again, and I was burning in oblivion.
Did you notice how the tone shifted, how I shifted, from and back to square one? I am trying to show you where I came from, to the party and back home, caring about the wrong things but atleast I cared.
We blur out these periods but they form the seeds and water of a life. When there is no one to turn to, the periods of anonymity, the summers of silence, they pick you up and nurture you in their insignificance. Your routines become your best friends, you get comfortable with honesty, there is little to remember so you live instead. The personhood of a “I” becomes better defined.
The fiber of life is sewn stronger by hope. It is nourished by the recipes you try, the boys who could someday be someone to you, the months of grudgingly accepting that maybe nothing would ever change and maybe life would still be alright.
These are the summers before magic. I saw it.
Beautiful Shivangi!