by Hayley F.
I never had a flair for the dramatics. Thus, this summer wasn’t a dramatic one, and certainly wasn’t a particularly memorable one.
There were no plane tickets meticulously concealed in passport sleeves, no spur-of-the-moment, windows-down, coming-of-age-movie road trips, no late-night confessions whispered beneath a meteor shower. It was just the kind of summer that crept in, quietly, unnoticeably and stayed. The weight of it heavy and gleaming and completely unbothered by the urgency of the rest of the year.
And I didn’t have a plan. For once, I didn’t want one.
The days unfolded slowly, blinking in and out of existence as the sun danced with the moon, alternating positions in the brilliant, blinding sky. This summer smelled of wrinkled pages in a book that was cherished but long forgotten. I woke at the whims of my body, because I had never been a morning person and I was never so acquainted with the patterns of the sun I just had to rise alongside it. I made eggs in comfortable silence, sat by the window with my journal, people watching and watching people. I listened to everything, to music and podcasts and background noise. Sometimes, I even sought comfort drifting through my own thoughts without a destination.
And that’s when I noticed them: thoughts that weren’t driven by projected grades or absurd goals or vicious comparison. Thoughts that simply existed. Unpolished, unrushed, mine.
I read books without taking notes. I watched old movies and laughed out loud when I understood and even when I didn’t understand. I let the sun kiss my skin unevenly, peppering the canvas with markers of a day my memories would spend eternity chasing. I ran errands in oversized shirts and didn’t flinch when I caught my reflection, untamed and wild, in the shop windows.
I remembered how much I loved the barely-there scent of sunscreen, the crackle of the spine of a new notebook, the calm that came inevitably after the summer rains. I remembered the version of myself that sang along to the radio when no one listened, that flooded with emotion at the sight of sunsets, each one more extraordinary than the last. I remembered that being is a wild liberty, fleeting and unique. I didn’t need to do something to feel like enough.
And so the blandest of summers wasn’t about reinventing myself. It was about remembering.
Remembering that I don?t have to constantly prove my worth. That sleepless rest isn’t wasted time. That joy, in its softest, plainest form, is still joy.
The summer wasn’t heralded by fireworks, or anything of such stature. It simply drifted in, as if it
was already here and then suddenly was-an extra layer to the already mundane tapestry.
But sometime between the interminable afternoons and the hazy-forgotten evenings, there was a change. It wasn’t a huge shift, more of a subtle reacquaintance with the hum of myself that had been drowned out by everything else.
And when it departed, it gave me something back.
It gave me, me.
About the Author
Hayley writes at the intersection of advocacy, medicine, and storytelling, using words to explore human experience, health, and the power of voice in everyday life.