There’s something surreal about calling this August. I don’t mean to say it feels closer to the first week of June, or when the air shifts to the smell of yellowed leaves mid-October. It doesn’t feel like August because it doesn’t feel like time at all. I hear this from my friends, coworkers, neighbors in passing, who confuse stories from last February into last week. As if summer, afternoon, weekday — these measurements of time lost meaning.
There are few moments, amid the muddied water, I can find that slick fishing line of time and reel myself in — hotter weather or holidays in between, determined to remind us. The universe throwing out a bone: Here’s what you used to feel this time of year. A landmark in the whitecaps of your memory. Any better? Even the old tricks don’t stick. July was too dry for even a campfire, let alone lighting a spark to fireworks and watching this tinderbox state be set aflame. It’s possible this will be the second Christmas I’ll feel a great wrong-doing in setting more than one place at the table.
There’s an adjustment period to adulthood that comes in understanding what a year looks like when it’s not divided into school seasons. A natural misfire, realizing there will be no two-week break come spring, or how the day works on past 3 P.M. Now, even years later, the routine isn’t taking root. What is this supposed to feel like? Something’s missing all summer. By the start of November, I cling quietly like thick steam to the windows. A seat to watch the natural poetry take place: a sobering metaphor in the bare shoulders of birch trees. As all things bloom, so they will die.
The haze from a fire one state away has lingered in Portland all week. NPR reports it was so hot in Sicily on Wednesday, oranges curdled on their branches. Somehow we’ve been sitting in a standstill while watching a vast acceleration take place. These past 18 months, one swift channel of water. Nothing to separate one week from the next, but a single current flowing through.
I know, just because something feels a certain way, doesn’t mean it is. In this span of prolonged calamity, it’s hard to miss how the brain shifts frequency. A primordial sense speaks up. I’ve witnessed my body run wiser than I’ve known it to be. On a walk out in the evening, I taste the tail end of smoke snaking through the trees, and can tell you the air quality level is sitting, at the very least, around the higher end of 75 AQI. In the city, my body pinballs through the streets, keeping an unconscious two yardsticks from anyone else. That sharpened observance you recognize in any stranger’s eyes when you look long enough. But how to bridge this disconnect between emotional instinct and incontestable truth. The calendar, every incoming e-mail, my phone first thing in the morning — all disembodied structures of time-keeping will tell me: Today is August 14th, 2021. It’s a Saturday, 4:16 P.M., high of 97℉ in Oregon.
There’s no gravity, no stirring in the sight of it. An older translation might mean it’s almost time for dinner. The summer is coming to a close. Maybe a tingle in the top shelf of my spine, worrying, “how best could I use my alone time before it’s gone?” That urgency before we found our rhythm in this march of time has been elaborately choreographed. To imagine what potential our hands hold in shaping society when one pillar in the foundation falters. Whether a haphazard slip into limbo or a hurried way of life approaching antiquation; this chipping barrier between biome and body giving way. Most nights, I step out to watch the moon wane and wax. I take longer to cook dinner. When I wake, I hear the juncos sing sunlight onto their feathers. For a moment, we have the space between leaving bed and the return to it. I wonder if it’s that we no longer feel the ticking pace of time, just all of the choices we’re making in place of it.
with love,
schuyler (sky-ler)
venmo: schuylerpeck