Today’s journaling / reflection prompt: What are the milestones that you celebrate? The anniversaries that you avoid? The ones you forget, the ones you can’t let go of. What memories do they stir up, what feelings, and how do you wish to acknowledge and honour yourself and those parts of you?
Since I was a kid, every year around early May, I always anticipate and look out for that distinct first feeling of summer.
Not the heat waves or ice cream cones popping up in kids’ sticky palms or any other tell-tale signs - but that first crisp summer morning, when you wake up at 5am to the broad sunlight, already settled in, no rising to the sun necessary, cool breeze on your eyelids that can fool you into thinking it’s still spring, if you want. But you don’t want. Because everything happens in the summer.
The air is just a little bit lazier, the sun a bit more well-rested, like you understand that deep down, it will stay for the day, even in the shade. Stick your head out the window to spy on neighbours’ open windows, limbs scattered across bedsheets behind confident no-curtain bedrooms, their plants and backs of photo frames sitting on windowsills like art that has all the time in the world for you, just you, nobody else is awake so nobody else exists. Just the birds. This day already feels like it’s brought you so much, and it promises even more. Everything will happen, soon. The smell of shampoo from down the street, some rosey, sweet smell from those flowing trees you keep wanting to look up the name for, that leave leaves all over your neighbours’ cars.
That first feeling hit me a few weeks ago, right before the heat began, lost in my own thoughts down by the pond looking at the new ducklings (so small, so fast, so unfearing) and suddenly feeling a change in the air, winds-in-the-east intuition, abruptly bringing me back into my body. And all at once, I’m in all the summers I’ve lived through - 7-11 slurpees, bike rides home at twilight, watering plants with E, rolling my windows down in the car blasting my favourite tunes CD. Hikes and mountains and the ocean and first loves and heartbreaks and feeling cinematic just reading, walking, sitting anywhere. Everything happens in the summer.
I felt it again this morning, sitting upright at 5am, feeling - for the first time in a long time - like I could be finally be still with exactly who I am, and accept, with courage and not wishful yearning, that I find myself exactly where I need to be.
K and I fell in love in the summer. (Everything happens in the summer.)
This week marks six years of our being together, two years of being engaged. (And still I read that word as “enraged” most days - love is a form of madness, isn’t it?) In three weeks’ time, with any luck, we will be married.
Our relationship is a fully settled toddler, just about to graduate First Grade. Or a middle-aged dog, orthopaedic bed and joint care. Or a young, still-brief sapling. It feels like a mix of all of these — our whole lives are still ahead of us, everything yet to be, and yet, there’s a stubbornness to all the ways, defined or not, that we’ll continue to relate to each other that reassures me. We are set in our ways of being in love. The most strange and enraging thing is that the more I recognise our fragility — and every milestone, every anniversary, I feel it more — the more certain I feel about this “always.”
With every new year, each higher portion that our relationship has been a part of the whole (“one fifth of our lives, wow..!”), I feel, again and again (and again and again and again and again) like I’ve gained a new depth to the realisation of how being with him - and the me who is in love and partnership with him - is the focal point around which everything else in my life naturally revolves.
Over and over, his love gives me the grounds to reimagine how everything might possibly fall together and be held in a world where gravity is never guaranteed.
This year, I can start to say the cheesiest things without a hint of sentimentality or embarrassment - because they’re no longer aphorisms or aspirations of a romantic heart, but the reality of our older-dog days: he is my world, in large ways and small. His love makes my life full and possible in ways I could never dream of. Everything good I have or am, I will always want to share with him.
—Except for this letter, the first in a long time for which he will not be my first reader, because he is still smiling through his sleep in the next room on this crisp summer morning, the sixth of these mornings in what I hope, with my whole helpless heart, to be many, many more.
I’m so glad we happened in the summer. Happy anniversary, my love.
Margin Notes
Is this the newsletter equivalent of shouting it from the rooftops? :) Thanks for reading, as always. It’s been almost half a year since I’ve written here, it feels good to be back for now. Time moves so weirdly these days, long days and short years. I hope you have been taking good care, wishing you a beautiful summer ahead, wherever you are. Hugs, K
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Photo by Tadeusz Lakota on Unsplash
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