Long Hot Summer Days
Long Hot Summer Days
August is the month when summer starts to rot but still doesn’t have the decency to die.
The sun shows up every morning with the punctuality of a debt collector, the walls are already warm before breakfast, and the air has that stale density of a room where somebody has been sleeping too long. Everything is supposed to feel alive, excessive, glorious.
That’s the official version. The real version is that at some point heat stops being a temperature and becomes an occupying force. It gets into the house, the bed, your clothes, your head. You wake up tired. You shower and five minutes later you’re stuck to yourself again. The whole world feels coated in a thin film of sweat and bad intentions. And while everyone keeps telling you to “enjoy the summer,” I start looking for dead things.
Not exactly dead. Worse. Things in the process of ending. Leaves turned into skin, empty husks, blackened stems, flowers that have lost every decorative excuse for existing and finally show what they’re made of. That’s when I want to make images. Not when things are perfect, but when perfection has already lost its grip. I want to catch the moment when something stops trying to be beautiful and becomes simply true. In August, this stuff is everywhere once you stop looking where you’re supposed to look. While summer is still doing its little stage act with blue skies and endless days, something at the edges is already giving up. Plants know before we do. They dry out. Hollow themselves. Build seeds. Strip away anything they no longer need. No nostalgia. No seasonal poetry. Just the basic administration of an ending.
Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to images that already feel like fall when fall is still nowhere in sight. Not because I’m desperate for orange leaves, and definitely not because I’m waiting for that domesticated version of October made of plaid blankets, cinnamon, and people clutching mugs like they contain an organ scheduled for transplant. What I want from fall is the gesture. The withdrawal. The surrender without ceremony. The point where the world stops producing and starts coming apart. After months of everything having to grow, bloom, open, ripen, fuck, bear fruit, smile at the sun, finally something says enough. A leaf curls in on itself. A flower closes. A stem turns black. Presentation over. No encore.
And I go looking for these things now because August lies. It tells you it’s going to last forever. At three in the afternoon it seems entirely possible that the sun has become a permanent condition of the universe and this is how we’ll live from now on: half naked, pissed off, slowly cooking inside our own homes. Then you find a leaf reduced to veins, almost transparent. You hold it against the light. You catch it. And there it is: the crack in the wall. Proof that something is already working against August. It doesn’t take much. A dry seed pod. A collapsed flower. A branch that has stopped feeding whatever used to depend on it. Small acts of sabotage.
Fall is already here.
It’s just waiting for this fucking heat to finish making a scene.