Summer. It's been a strange one. Not broken, not even really bad, but definitely not the kind of summer I had mentally penciled in. And honestly, I've been feeling more and more like Sylvia Plath this summer — longing to feel like myself (whatever that is) again.
Still, joy found me, mostly during my time off. Sitting with cousins, my aunt, on their porch in Floral Park, just chattering birds. Seeing my cousin Nicole, her baby Caden, a new star. Picking anniversary flowers at My Front Yard Flower Farm. Tacos, neighbors. Old friends, catching up. Celebrating birthdays and anniversaries. Unpacking a friend's house. Sitting on benches with ice cream dripping down my arm, and on occasion as I have the bandwidth to really take them in all their glory, the sudden, pinky sunsets.
And, there have been unexpected sparks of light. Sometimes, that light has come from the clothes I've worn. There's been this one Kate Spade dress I rented this summer—a story in itself, all my life in flowers, cloaked in black but bursting with those summer lilies that used to surround me, wrapped in a playful silhouette—that, for a few hours at least, felt like putting on a more joyful version of myself.
It's funny how something so simple, like a dress, can offer some happiness and optimism. More on my musings on renting clothes to come, but for now, it's enough to say that even in this strange summer, my wardrobe has been one of those unexpected things that held me up.
Grappling with how I've been feeling this summer has been a journey. From flat-out ignoring it, to just kinda shrugging it off, and finally, making active changes to grab back the pieces of myself I lost along the way, and to process how those parts of me got lost. And you know what? I can feel something. Perhaps my invincible summer that Albert Camus once spoke about has just been delayed. Change is coming, and no matter how anxious or scared I am, that feeling that change is coming is there.
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