August: on Taylor Swift, infatuation, & summer’s last hurrah
an essay devoted to August 2021
Noelle and I are blasting “august” by Taylor Swift and flying down Highway 99, singing with the hope that things will get better. The type of hope only two girls from a broken small town can have. The sky is turning pink, and we’re growing older. Summer will end soon. I’m not ready to give it a funeral, not yet. We’re screaming, chests swelling and voices cracking, then we’re silent, letting Taylor Swift sing the outro on her own. “But do you remember?” she asks the sun, catching it before it dips below the horizon line. “Remember when I pulled up and said, ‘Get in the car’ / And then canceled my plans just in case you’d call? / Back when I was livin’ for the hope of it all.”
I signal right and continue my drive home, leaning into the winding pattern country roads often follow, thinking again about memory. About control and want, and how August seems the perfect month to think about those things, because it’s the time of year that shows us how beautiful things burn bright but they burn fast.
Through the radio, Taylor Swift asks again, “Do you remember?”
Here’s what I remember:
Everything.
August, Act 1
My family is playing a tee ball game late into the night; a blur of cousins and dogs are running the bases. My grandma makes the winning catch of the game, and every blade of grass lights up with praise. Soon enough, autumn will come and cloak the Pacific Northwest in sheets of amber and rain, so we stay out later than usual, picking up balls and playing tag. The whole world feels so permanent under this never-setting sun. That’s the funny thing I’ve noticed about humans. We’re always convincing ourselves we have just a bit more time.
Act 2
Sometimes I wish I could wrap up a memory and put it in a paper sack, so I can pull it out during lunch break at school, remembering that time in summer.
What I mean to say is: I really just want to possess the magic of summer’s last hurrah. To hold it in my hands. Taylor Swift knows what I’m talking about. I listen to her song “august,” well, everyday of August, and mean every word I sing. I know, I know, months and moments, summer crushes and past selves, they’ll all slip through my fingers. But Swift’s “august” acknowledges the hope that maybe, just maybe, I could call the salty brine of the Pacific/hazy light/boy I like mine, if only for a month.
I really want to be okay with change. To be able to say, “I love you world, even if you won’t stay gold like this forever.”
Act 3
I remember attaching wishes to stars with Carly, knowing we can’t stay together forever, but laying on the hot pavement and shoveling caramel corn in our mouths anyway. I remember being suspended in the muggy air of the American South in the summertime, watching my brother play on fields of green and eating soft pretzels on bleachers with KoKo. I remember all those moments that glitter, and I try to capture them and preserve them in my heart forever, but it never works that way, does it?
Act 4
I become aware of my want for control while tumbling underwater in California. Girl versus wave… the wave will always win. After wiping out and snorting an unhealthy amount of saltwater too many times, Josh grabs my hand and instructs me to ease into the wave, that the only way I’ll not drown is by following the flow of the ocean. “Stop resisting it. Just see where it takes you.” His words illuminate my path towards freedom. At this point in the summer, I can’t figure out if I’m in love with my friends or how many colleges I’m going to apply to or if it’s the salt water or the fish tacos I had for lunch that’s making my stomach hurt. But all those worries can slide away as soon as I give myself the permission to surrender to the power of the wave, because it’s much stronger than I’ll ever be. The wave is much older than I’ll ever be, too. I’ll never know what lengths it had to go to to meet me in this moment. I know I’m being sentimental, but this is my favorite day of summer. It ends, like all days do, with the sun dipping below a horizon line and thoughts swirling around in my head. Usually I think of all the things I would have done different, but not today. I am burnt from the sun and there’s sand in my hair and I am alive. And I wouldn’t change a thing.
Act 5
Eventually, I hang up the feelings of summer flings and youthful dreams alongside my swimsuit, wringing them out and hoping they will float away on a Pacific breeze. “Handle with care. Let them return to the ocean,” I think to myself. The place where everything is allowed to be free.
In August, I learn that hope, loss, love, and letting go are all bunched together and tied up by a golden string. Summers end, crushes fizzle, but a wave never stops. Maybe that’s a way to look at life—all of the people you’ve ever loved and sunsets you’ve lived under and times you’ve cried to Taylor Swift have made you who you are. Nothing in life is a single, easy thing. When you realize that, and you truly believe it, maybe that’s when the overwhelming urge to possess something slides away. You don’t have to capture it, because you no longer fear it’ll be gone. It’s just another wave in the ocean, everything falling into everything, sculpting you into who you are today.
Keep on living for the hope of it all,
Maya
August ‘22, one year later. Sorry mom…