summer is over and i still can't drive

nonlinear thoughts to things that change and stay the same

passenger princess 4ever. and that concludes all i’ll be saying on the matter. so take the misleading title aside and ruminate on the fact that summer sadness has no choice but to begone, because i’ve been thinking about some things. like how the end of summer holds two opportunities to say goodbye to it. academically, it ends the night before school, before that last first day or first day for the first time, every time, every year. seasonally, it ends sometime in september. there’s nothing poetic i can deduce from that.

i think about the fact that i won’t be the youngest kind of adult for long, and how after i wrote that line i came across a tweet where a sixteen year old said that olivia rodrigo can’t be making angsty teen music anymore since she’s pushing 20.

pushing 20. okay.

that’s certainly an argument, but here’s mine: everyone should be twenty-one for two years. one is just not enough, can’t possibly capsulate the best and worst montages of being young—of being younger rather than youthful. and now i’m back to school and work and i don’t know what to do with myself besides all the things that i have to do.

“or maybe everyone was a prodigy if they worked hard enough and long enough and became, at a young age, competent at a thing. perhaps what people misjudged for prodigious talent was really just unexpected competence.”

brandon taylor, the late americans

summer is over and and i still can’t drive, but that is perhaps a long-reigning constant. still don’t, still can’t, still finding comfort in things that remain the same. like the fact that i need the ac incredibly low and cold and near freezing and my fan on so i can bundle up to sleep. like how i still love and adore and rep the color purple, forever and always, but no one shows intense loyalty to a color than people who choose pink as their favorite. like how i still take my tea with coffee creamer. like how i still really love blush even when i go from being obsessed with highlight to feeling pretty neutral about it. i feel very neutral about most things, so that’s another constant.

but it will be fall soon. cozy spiked lattes and stuff animals with their little ears poking out of little beanies for some, dark academia books and aesthetics for the pretentious others—aka me. sep-nov-oct is my tis the season. it isn’t spring so i’m not thinking about changing anything about my current behaviors or hobbies or lifestyle choices. it isn’t winter so i’m not traveling or adjusting my capsule wardrobe or looking for my teddy bear coat that i somehow misplace every year.

“it was the golden time of year. every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. the sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything got bluer. how many perfect autumns did a person get?”

elif batuman, either/or

char texted me after stalking my storygraph account of all things to convince me to finish reading tender is the flesh. i still haven’t finished… but my dnf-to-be-re-explored pile is long: homebodies, she who became the sun, the atlas paradox, the stone sky, luster, sirens & muses, that one sally rooney book and so on and so forth. aarushi still wants me to finish gideon the ninth. girl, sorry, but i just can’t ! i feel like reading tamsyn muir’s writing will mess up my prose.

fai became time sensitive, because she’s graduated and gone, no longer two steps away from my bedroom door. i think i’ll always need her, but i’ll need to learn not to need her for a little bit.

i’ve been watching asia be cutieful from a distance. i think we’ll be closer than ever, now.

pylades: i’ll take care of you.

orestes: it’s rotten work.

pylades: not to me. not if it’s you.

i’m working on a piece about language, or rather, my lack thereof. because i can only understand 60% of what i hear in french and respond in 100% english, and i only know like two phrases in lingala—one of them being a threat—and i didn’t pick up any italian despite all the times i visit my father, and asia loves texting in hangul but i can’t differentiate any of the lines and patterns.

reem had terrible matcha that left stains on her clothes and didn’t know if she should change before kbbq or not. but after the night was over she could go home with all the marks of green and orange on her little white dress and know she lived.

i write about skincare (medical, not beauty) for a top secret, super reclusive job and for some reason i started a blog with It is so painful to have a body when I’m sick, and when I’m sad, it feels as if I don’t have a body at all. and i think i hate it, or i think i hate how much i could have liked it (if only it wasn’t written by me). not for how revealing or depressing it is. but because who do i think i am? a poet? a poet is the most embarrassing thing i could be. it works better for others. i’m too stunted by neutrality to crave something so emotional. that blog doesn’t even let me type in all lowercase. could you believe i was talking about summer at all?