so much left to say but i guess here are 2 or 3 things i need to remember

what’s an appropriate and good enough way to speak of summer? a happy summer — because i now have new things that i really like having. a sad summer — because i spent many long days at home feeling so alone. a brief summer — because i somehow want a few more days. just a summer — because i’ll probably live through a bunch more. a summer — because i’ll never be 23 in august again.

the intensity of how i feel now about this summer will grow mild in my memory with time, so i need urgently to find some way to take stock of all of this and put it in the back for easy recollection months or years later. otherwise, the fear of doing a disservice to this period of time will remain, a time that is significant for what i think is the beginning of the final developmental stages of my prefrontal cortex. i say this with conviction because i can physically feel the great many neural pathways my brain has recently formed. there is no other way to explain the strange and new things that i find myself capable of feeling. except maybe the fact that, and i have to include this for honesty’s sake, i stopped taking happy pills. i now have tears when i think about the fall of beirut following the end of french colonialism in lebanon. this might be an indication of having suddenly grown more intelligent or empathetic, but it could very well just be my brain readjusting to its full emotional capacity.

regardless. i remember summer last year as only an awful window that can never happen again. all i can recall is i was in the pits of degeneracy just waiting the whole summer out. but i’m sure it was more than that, and i can’t remember anything else because all else is dim in the archives of my memory next to the towering image of me trying to off myself in my room. this summer was probably not as emotionally rife, but still complex in a good way, and deserves a fitting eulogy as such. i say “eulogy”, and not something like farewell or recap, because this is what this is, a loving and premature goodbye. i thought i was categorically devoted to running away from home, and every other time i came back i just wanted to leave, quick. but this time it feels different, and leaving feels like abandoning something unfinished. like being made to start somewhere else when in the middle of something else. here i was only starting to make sense of my own form and content, and the strange expressions of love that i was raised on at home. like how i just figured that every time i make a show of giving up too early, i betray an inane prayer for the other person to come back with an offer to mend things. never without the knowledge that this is unbecoming of an adult, and unfair to the other adult, to harbor such an expectation, i have gone on wishing to be indulged. i made the connection the other day when i walked away from a conversation in annoyance, but my mother followed me into the next room to ask me again what i wanted. this felt familiar and was what i needed — a lingering show of love, which i know to be unfair but learned to expect.

this is not to say that i spent the summer diagnosing and recuperating; i still have a long way to go on the path of the latter. but i made some breakthroughs in undiagnosing as well — i realized i don’t have any attention deficit issues at all. i spent so much time this summer working on and learning things that i genuinely enjoy and in places where i see a valid reason to let something occupy my time. but the whole time in university i thought i was just wired to evade responsibilities. take, for example, how i read 800 pages of the fifth harry potter book when i was younger and 600 pages of crime and punishment in freshman year without ever complaining, but never got to a data structures assignment until a day before it was due. i probably just didn’t see any real value in writing a thousand lines of code that didn’t do anything useful. this is worth writing about here because this knowledge is now dearer to me than life: i just have to show myself the bigger picture if i need to get anything done, and i am thankfully neurotypical enough to see it to the end on my own. had i known the value of taking data structures once, i would’ve finished the assignments in time and avoided having to take the class a second time.

listing my summer realizations this year i also find it necessary to ask whether anything i am saying or writing constitutes original thinking. i would like to draw attention to a james baldwin quote that falls very close to this sentiment, “you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” i am compelled to retaliate, “so what?” baldwin here exhibits a chickenpox mentality — that just because it was felt once it need not be felt again. but it almost goes against the nature of an emotion to be quelled simply by an awareness of its unoriginality, and i further assume serious doubts about any consolation this line of thinking may have ever offered anyone. the truth is that chickenpox is not a good metaphor for life. life perhaps bears closer resemblance to the principles of the penal code of 1800 BC babylonia, where full dental extraction was a form of capital punishment. if you were sentenced to have all your teeth pulled out, the pain of having the first teeth extracted would do very little to make the 31 other extractions any easier. humans assume existence on the condition that they will feel, and feel again.

this summer is then just one of many more dental extractions to come and for me to recount (metaphor intended not in the punishment sense). but also, on a parting note, what’s so special about summer? why must august be the month of reckoning? it could just be an entirely made up state of mind. like how most alien sightings are reported in north america or encounters with jinns are limited to south asia, probably explained by the space race amplifying interest in extra terrestrial life or religion cementing the existence of the paranormal. it might as well be taylor swift who started this whole narrative by writing a song like that and calling it “august”. but there's other things to consider. when the migrant birds come to bangladesh in the winter, they only gather in this one particular college campus in the outskirts of the capital. it has been this way for years. there are other places in the country just as warm and hospitable, but it's like someone arranged for the birds to rest there, and they oblige. it is as if nature has designs on certain times or places, and life unfolds around them in accordance.

so this is only a roundabout way of saying: some things just are. and there is so much comfort, and sweetness, in knowing that i will have another summer, and between now and then i can keep moving and i can change, then on another august day i can emerge from all the good and bad days to sit down and say things are better, just like i did today.