Category: Uncategorized

Not the last summer — you don’t know it’s the last one while it’s happening, that’s the whole tragedy of it. But there’s a summer somewhere in your early teens where you were still the kind of person who got in the pool at ten in the morning and got out at five in the afternoon and that was the entire day and it was enough. No agenda. No sense that time was being spent on something that should produce a result. Just hours of water and sun and pruned fingers and the particular exhaustion of having done nothing for a very long time.

At some point after that, swimming became something you do for thirty minutes with intention. Exercise. Laps. Getting somewhere. The pool became a tool for a goal rather than a place you just existed in. And the weird formless hours of childhood water time just stopped, unremarked upon, because you were becoming a person with places to be and things to do and a growing awareness that lying on a pool raft for four hours is something you’d have to justify to yourself now.

What I miss isn’t the swimming exactly. It’s the relationship with time that made it possible. The complete absence of the sense that something else should be happening instead. Kids at a pool are not thinking about what they’re missing by being at the pool. They are entirely at the pool. That’s the thing that goes away gradually and then all at once and doesn’t really come back unless you work very hard at it, and working very hard at being present is its own kind of irony that I haven’t fully resolved.

I got in a pool last summer at a friend’s house and floated on my back for about twenty minutes staring at the sky and it was the closest I’ve come in years to that old feeling. Not quite it — I was still aware of time passing, still aware that dinner was at seven and I’d need to dry off and be a person again — but close. A thin slice of the original thing. Enough to remember what it was. Enough to miss it properly.

This summer I’m going to get in a pool and stay there until I don’t feel like being there anymore. No laps. No plan. I say this every year. This year I might actually do it. The bar is low. I just have to float.

The body starts annotating things. You sleep wrong and your neck files a formal complaint that lasts four days. You eat something that never used to be a problem and your stomach sends a memo. You sit on the floor and getting back up becomes a small project that requires a plan and possibly a surface to push off of. None of this is dramatic. It’s just new information, delivered daily, about the terms and conditions you apparently agreed to by continuing to exist.

The strange part is that your interior age doesn’t keep up. Inside you’re still the same approximate person you were at twenty-three, with the same reference points and the same sense of humor and the same feeling that you’re roughly at the beginning of things. And then you catch yourself in a mirror or a window or a photo and the outside has been quietly doing something else entirely. The gap between how you feel and how you’re apparently presenting to the world gets wider and you’re not sure when it opened.

You start noticing it in small calibrations. The music at a restaurant is too loud in a way it never used to be. You know what you want at a dinner before they bring the menus. You find yourself genuinely interested in the weather, not as small talk but as information you need. Bedtime stops being a surrender and starts being something you look forward to with a warmth that would have horrified your earlier self.

The things people said would happen do happen, eventually. You care less about what people think, but not in the fearless way you imagined — more like you just have less energy to spend on it and have reassigned the budget. You get better at some things and quietly stop trying at others and call it knowing yourself. Maybe it is. Maybe that’s the whole game — slowly trading ambition for accuracy, figuring out what’s actually yours versus what you picked up because you thought you were supposed to want it.

I don’t feel older. I feel like myself with more context. The body disagrees and it’s going to keep disagreeing and at some point I’ll stop being surprised by that. Probably around the same time I stop sleeping wrong. So never.

There are books I’ve owned for years that I genuinely intend to read. They sit on the shelf looking patient and slightly accusatory. I pick them up sometimes, read the first page, put them down. Not because they’re bad — I don’t know if they’re bad, I’ve never gotten far enough to find out. They’re just not right yet. The mood for them hasn’t arrived and I can’t manufacture it and I’ve stopped trying.

The mood is specific and non-negotiable. There’s a mood for long quiet novels and a different mood for something that moves fast and doesn’t ask much of you. There’s a mood for essays, which requires you to be in a state of mild restlessness that wants to be shaped into something. There’s a mood for rereading — which is its own category, which requires you to want the comfort of already knowing, which usually shows up during the harder stretches of a year without announcing itself as such.

The best reading experiences are the ones where the book and the mood arrive at the same time by accident. You weren’t planning to read that particular book, you just picked it up because it was there, and it turned out to be exactly what some part of you needed without knowing it. Those books change you a little. Not because they’re better than other books but because they found you at the right moment, which is as much about you as it is about them.

The worst is being in a reading mood but not the mood for anything you own. You cycle through the shelves like a person standing in front of an open fridge — something is in there, technically, something should work — but nothing is right and eventually you close the fridge and watch TV instead. The mood expires unused. The books wait.

I have a book on my nightstand I’ve been meaning to finish for four months. The bookmark is on page 180. I was really into it and then something shifted and now I can’t get back in. I’ll get back in. The mood will come back around. These things move in cycles and you can’t rush them and in the meantime the book just sits there, holding my place, waiting for me to return to the person who was reading it.

Everything is slightly smaller than you remembered. The school, the streets, the distance between places that felt enormous when you were covering them on a bike. You drive a route that used to take twenty minutes and it takes seven and you sit in the parking lot of wherever you’ve ended up trying to figure out where the time went — not the years, the actual minutes. The geography shrank while you weren’t looking and it did it without telling you.

The places that mattered most are usually gone or wrong. The restaurant where something important happened is a phone repair shop. The field is a subdivision. The convenience store where you spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of your adolescence is now a different convenience store with different lighting and it doesn’t count. The new version is standing in the spot but it has no idea what happened there and there’s no plaque.

What’s strange is the things that haven’t changed. There’s always something — a diner, a road, a particular smell in a particular neighborhood — that is exactly as it was and hits you somewhere below the ribs. Not nostalgia exactly, something more physical than that. Your body recognizes the place before your brain does. You drove this road at seventeen with the windows down and something was just starting and your whole nervous system kept that on file and has been waiting to play it back.

The people who stayed are living in a parallel version of the place you left. Same streets, different life, different set of references. They remember things you’ve forgotten and have forgotten things you still carry. You’re the same age and have completely different museums. When you see each other you spend some time comparing collections — do you have this one, what about this — and sometimes it matches and sometimes it doesn’t and both of those feel like something.

I went back last spring for a weekend. Drove every old route. Ate at the one place that was still there. Felt eighteen for about forty-five seconds outside the house I grew up in and then felt completely my actual age again. It was enough. It’s enough just to know it’s still there, holding the shape of something you used to be, not asking you to be it again. 

Someone says something nice to you and your first instinct is to immediately dismantle it. “Oh this old thing.” “I actually messed up the whole second half.” “You’re being too kind.” You take the compliment, hold it for about half a second, and then hand it back slightly damaged. The person who said it now has to reassure you that they meant it, which puts them in a strange position because they already told you and that should have been enough and here we both are.

The thing is, deflecting a compliment feels like humility but it’s actually a little rude if you think about it too hard. The person looked at something you did or made or wore and formed a genuine opinion and decided to tell you about it. That takes a small amount of courage — saying something kind out loud always does. And your response is to tell them they’re wrong. You’re not being modest. You’re correcting them.

The correct response is “thank you” and then nothing. Just that. Two syllables, full stop, let it land. But almost nobody can do it. There’s a silence after “thank you” that feels like it needs to be filled, like you owe something else, like simply accepting the good thing being handed to you is too easy or too arrogant or too much like believing you deserved it. So you add the thing that undercuts it. You add it every time.

Children are better at this. Tell a kid you like their drawing and they will look you dead in the eye and say “I know” or “thank you” and go back to the drawing. They haven’t learned yet that receiving something well is somehow suspect. That gets trained out slowly, by culture or modesty or the fear of seeming like you think too highly of yourself, until you end up as an adult who can’t take a compliment without apologizing for it.

I’ve been practicing just saying thank you and stopping. It feels uncomfortably bold every single time, like I’m getting away with something. I’m not getting away with anything. Someone said something nice. I said thank you. That’s the whole transaction. I’m still not used to it.

Nothing changes at midnight. You know this. The version of you that existed at 11:59pm on December 31st is the same version that shows up at 12:01am on January 1st, with the same knees, the same inbox, the same unresolved situation with that one person, the same thing you’ve been meaning to deal with since October. The calendar rolled over. That’s it. That’s the whole event.

And yet. There’s something that happens anyway. Not transformation — nothing that dramatic. More like a collective exhale, a permission slip the whole culture signs at once. You’re allowed to try again. You’re allowed to draw a line and say everything before this was a draft. The year becomes a unit of measurement for how you’re doing and the new one is empty and the emptiness feels like possibility even when you know better, even when you’ve been through enough January 2nds to understand how this goes.

The resolutions are almost beside the point. Most of them don’t survive February and everyone knows it going in, which is why there’s always a slight performance quality to announcing them. What matters is the gesture — the act of deciding that this version of time is different from the last one, that you are someone who intends things, that the future is a place you’re actively pointed toward. The resolution is less a plan than a flag you plant in the ground of who you want to be.

What I find genuinely moving about it, underneath all the eye-rolling, is that people keep doing it. Every year, reliably, people who have been burned by January before show up again and try again. Not because they’ve forgotten how it went last time but because the alternative — deciding that nothing can start fresh, that the past just keeps compounding forward with no reset available — is a worse thing to believe. The ritual is a little irrational and it might be necessary for exactly that reason.

I didn’t make any resolutions this year. I told myself it was because I’m past that, because I’ve matured out of the need for arbitrary markers. Mostly I think I just didn’t want to be the one who broke them again. Which is its own kind of hope, actually. Still protecting the possibility. Just in case.

Not because it used to be ordinary and now it’s rare — though that’s true. But because a voicemail is your actual voice, unedited, in real time, committed to permanence before you knew how it was going to end. A text you can revise. An email you can sleep on. A voicemail is you, mid-thought, figuring it out as you go, and then the beep and then you’re done and it’s there forever or until they delete it, which some people never do.

Most people my age treat a ringing phone like a fire alarm — something has gone wrong, something is urgent, why is this happening. An unknown number calling is practically a threat. Even known numbers feel presumptuous now, like the person is showing up unannounced, demanding your full attention in real time without scheduling it first. We have collectively decided that calling someone without texting first is a little rude, which would have been completely insane to explain to someone in 1995.

And yet. There are voicemails I’ve kept for years. My grandmother left one the week before she died that I didn’t know was the last one until it was. I still have it. I’ve listened to it maybe four times total because it’s not something you do casually — you have to be in a certain state to hear someone’s actual voice from a moment that no longer exists. It’s a different thing than a text. A text is words. A voicemail is a person breathing in a room on a Tuesday afternoon that is now years ago.

The irony is that we’ve made phone calls so uncomfortable that the voicemail — the fallback, the consolation prize for a missed call — has become the more meaningful artifact. We avoided the conversation and got something better. A little capsule of someone being themselves without knowing anyone was watching. Just talking into a phone in a room, trying to say a thing, hoping to be heard.

I should call people more. I know this. I’m going to text them about it instead.

There are benches everywhere. Parks, sidewalks, outside pharmacies, in the middle of malls that are slowly becoming something else. They’re there, they’re empty, and almost nobody uses them on purpose. You sit on a bench now only if you’re waiting for someone, recovering from something, or too tired to keep going. Sitting on a bench with nowhere to be and nothing to do has somehow become a thing that requires an explanation.

It didn’t used to. There’s a whole tradition — in Europe especially but also in older American cities — of sitting outside and watching things happen. Not waiting. Not killing time. Just being present in a place while the place does what it does. Two hours on a bench in a piazza is not wasted time in certain parts of the world. It’s an afternoon. It’s what you did. Nobody asks what you accomplished.

We lost that somewhere in the optimization. Every minute is supposed to be in motion now, supposed to be productive or restorative in a trackable way — a walk with a step count, a rest with a sleep score. Just sitting outside watching strangers walk by doesn’t produce anything and can’t be logged anywhere and so it has quietly fallen out of the repertoire of acceptable ways to spend time.

Which is a shame because benches are one of the better places to remember that you’re a person in a world full of other people. Everyone who walks past has somewhere to be and a reason and a whole interior life you’ll never access. The guy with the bags. The woman on the phone who laughs at something and then looks serious again immediately. The kid who stops to look at a pigeon for way longer than any adult would allow themselves to. You see all of it from a bench. You see none of it from your car or your phone or the inside of anywhere.

I sat on a bench last week for about twenty minutes on the way to somewhere else. Nothing happened. It was genuinely one of the better parts of my week and I couldn’t tell you why. The bench was outside a dry cleaner. It doesn’t matter. I was just there, and for a little while that was enough.

Not what you watch. What you put on when you’re not really watching. The thing that runs while you clean, while you eat alone, while you fold laundry and let your mind go somewhere else. That show is chosen without ego because nobody is judging you for it, not even yourself. It’s purely functional. It just needs to be there, filling the room with the right kind of noise, the right temperature of human presence. That requirement reveals something.

Some people need laugh tracks. Not because they find it funnier but because the rhythm of it — setup, joke, laugh, reset — creates a kind of structure that makes a quiet apartment feel inhabited. Some people need true crime, which sounds dark but is actually about the opposite of darkness: a narrator with a calm voice working steadily toward an answer, order being restored, someone figuring it out. Some people need cooking shows, which are essentially just watching competent people do things carefully, which is its own form of comfort if you think about it.

Mine is a show I’ve seen enough times that I could reconstruct any episode from audio alone. That’s the point. Something new requires attention. Something familiar just runs. I know where the sad parts are so I can brace for them or leave the room. I know the rhythm of it the way you know the layout of your own kitchen in the dark. It’s not entertainment anymore. It’s infrastructure.

There’s a whole theory of loneliness hiding in this somewhere. The background show is a solution to a problem most people don’t name out loud — that silence in an empty space has a texture to it, a weight, that most humans find hard to sit inside for long. We’re social animals who have arranged our lives around increasing amounts of solitude, and the television is one of the things we built to make that more bearable. It’s a roommate that never needs anything from you.

I’m not saying that’s sad. I’m saying it’s human. I’m also saying the show you picked says more about what you need than anything on your watchlist ever could. Ask someone what they put on in the background and you’ll learn something real about them in about four seconds.

Not the good kind. The kind where you arrive and immediately want to leave. There you are — same face, more or less, but something is off about the eyes or the posture or the way you’re holding your shoulders like you’re bracing for something. You remember that year now. You remember what you were bracing for. The photo caught it without trying to, without knowing, and now it’s just sitting there in your camera roll between a screenshot of a meme and a picture of someone’s dog.

The strange thing is you were probably fine in that moment. The photo exists because something happened worth photographing — a birthday, a trip, someone’s wedding. You were there, you were present, you maybe even had a good time that day specifically. But the year was in you anyway and the camera found it. You can’t fake your way out of a lens when the weight is that consistent.

What’s harder is the photos where you look fine. Happy, even. And you know — you know for a fact — that three days after that photo was taken everything fell apart, or was already falling apart, and the smile is real but it’s uninformed. The person in the photo doesn’t know yet. They’re standing there in a good shirt having a good time and they have no idea what’s coming. You want to warn them. You can’t. They already lived it. So did you. That’s the whole thing.

I think this is why people get weird about old photos in a way they don’t get weird about other old objects. A jacket from a bad year is just a jacket. A photo is a record of a specific moment of being alive, which means it’s also a record of everything surrounding that moment that didn’t make it into the frame. The photo is the thing you chose to keep. Everything else is implied.

I look okay now. I think. It’s hard to tell from the inside. I guess I’ll know in a few years when I find the photos.