It’s a late summer evening, but Stranger in the Alps by Phoebe Bridgers is playing from my record player like it’s mid-autumn.
Music doesn’t have an official season, but the ghost on the album cover and the inexplicably haunting sound of her voice are all I need to hallucinate orange leaves in my room.
Wishing the time away, again.
I’m so sick of writing that sentence, again.
But as different as I proclaim this year to be, old habits die hard. They die with a final effort of strength beyond what they enforced on me ever before. They latch on, digging into my skin, refusing to let me go, to let me live.
Wasting the days away, again.
“I guess it’s too late to change it now,” Bridgers sings.
Writing too late at night, again.
But I’d be a liar if I said I cared, and that’s why I lie awake; I’m unable to grow and static in my current state.
Growth. I think I alluded to that a bit last year. Those columns are covered in ivy, preserved and pressed, boasting memories and a feeling of peace. Untouchable, yet beckoning. Evergreen, yet dying.
But that’s all gone, and I haven’t turned back, I promise.
I love the rhythm, even though I’m afraid of settling into it. I love that I’m typing this with no deadline in sight or reason to do anything other than sleep. I may be too lazy to open my computer sitting a foot away from me, but I’m compelled to capture any moment capable of being turned into words.
I’ve heard this album a million times, yet today I heard the loud, suffocating heat of a ninety-degree day and still decided to yearn for fall.
Yearning. It’s one of my self-proclaimed cliches. The emotion itself is so overused in my writing—in my life. I’m not sorry this time, though. I’m sick of August, and I’m sick of summer.
Still, it’s a late summer evening, and I’m playing fall music. No accordance lives in my room; from the estival pink that sits in every crevice to the cold gray creeping into the light, I am torn.
With the fall will come assurance and then I’ll know how to feel. I’ll be back into the rhythm that I’m helplessly trying to mimic with my out-of-season records and my sweaters in August. I’ll be back into the swing of things, and the fact that I’m still sitting here, typing away on my phone instead of trying to rest, will be my normal.
“And I want to know what would happen / If I surrender to the sound.”
The sound. The screams of the papers at the bottom of the piles, the whispers of the illicit joy I couldn’t stand to jinx, the faint melodies of the in-between.
The sound of my poetic, prolific evening has decrescendoed. With a click, the record gradually ceases its spinning, but I’m still dizzy as I shut the lights off and wait for my words to make sense to me.
Wake me up when August ends.
