I made this space to hold the way things feel in my head this blog is going to be a little quiet, a little messy, but mine. If any of it feels familiar to you, I’m glad you’re here. Welcome.
Why does summer make me feel so foggy? Why does the sun feel like an intrusion, a force that leaves no space for sorrow, only reinforcing the idea that the skin I live in is not genuine?
Again, welcome to my little corner of the internet, where I’ll gather my thoughts like scattered notes. I don’t know if this blog will be a collection of answers or just more questions, but either way, I want to lay them out somewhere.
Summer used to be my favorite season. As a child, I loved it for one reason alone: swimming. But beneath that, I think I loved swimming because it was the closest I ever came to flying. I would dive in, hold my breath, and let the water consume me. The world would fall silent. My heartbeat and breathing were the only things left in my control. Everything else, the sounds of my surroundings, the weight of reality, blurred into nothing.
I have always been fascinated with death, with loss, with the inevitability of things slipping away. Living things and others like pencil cases, coloring books, battery-operated toys. Nothing was ever safe from decay.
My therapist, who I had been on and off seeing since I was 14, once told me that all he could hear in my words back then was loneliness.
I was lucky, to have gone to speech therapy when I was two and a half. There, I didn’t stutter, not even once. It didn’t match with the fact that, at home, I could barely get through a four-word sentence without falling apart.
Summer meant freedom from school, from the exhausting act of pretending. But then, after one last August—one that feels lighter, almost untouched now—I drifted through time as I always had. Days passed the way they always did, carrying me toward another late September. And one quiet afternoon, while I waited for the new university year to take over my life, my father died. He left nothing behind. Nothing but a sweaty imprint on the bed where he took his last breath and some American dollars adding up to 360, probably set aside for emergencies.
That money covered some of the beers I drank in university.
I think that was the moment that defined all this. Summer feels like a ticking clock now.
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