August 7, 2026.

Friday.

Something’s been in the air, or from what I know, exists in the metaphysical.

In the most humid of days do I see it, flickering in an obscurity that has barely blurred itself out of my own field of understanding. Lately when I wake from my sleep, I feel like I have arrived back to the grounded world. But in my subconscious does it feel like I’m in my most honest world; my most emotional world. There is something to note about August, and its anticipatory nature. Its days spread with the loudest cicadas. Its yielding of the most mature vegetables in the garden. The sunsets stretching in the most saturated skies. It is an environment which wears me down. Softens my exterior. It holds me, in gentleness, and it undresses the chainmail I’ve encased myself in to brunt-force my way through the year. It’s not growth which I anticipate; rather, it is a return to my natural state of reflection. This season it has come to me in my dreams. Intimate and careful. Honest. In these dreams I am the visitor, rather than the one who is stationary. In them, I see the people who I’ve loved, some of them from years ago. Others, lately, though I no longer hold closeness, or presentness with any of them. The line between memory and haunting in this intermediary world is blurry to me. When I remember these loved ones, is there still a shared intimacy in the very act of returning? Or am I just walking through the shells of these rooms alone, though the markings on the walls appear to still be there? I think there’s a communal aspect of choosing to no longer know of each other. Is it still a shared moment, is it still a shared being, if you’ve let go at the same time? I still remember the final time we were close. The exiting moments of a world in which I felt known & to know. Those memories seem vivid, and textural, and maybe it is because of my subconscious looping these memories, with an attached expectation that they’ll be overwritten, they’ll be additionalized, they’ll be renewed. Expectations as result of a habit that was built upon years of collaboration. It’s crazy to ask this: Did you forget my voice? I don’t remember what it was like to feel the airwaves of that final phone call, mid-run, sun long-set by then, though I still sat in the building’s shade, or what it last remembered for the day, asphalt still warm and holding onto the sun that was just there. I just remember: my heart hollowing to the tears that formed through the phone; I remember: a closeness that confused me in a years-long afterwards; I remember: a tenderness that was familiar. A familiarity that was tender. But it was and is a clearness that I feel, when I walk right up to that memory a year ago today. The months go fast. The days go sooner. But my memories move slowly, like the thickness of the air that lays on me today, and they work in an autonomous state. This August has been quiet, as most of them are. In its liminalities do I find my memories which remind me that there are still some fluids in my heart which keep those fading memories alive, though every day is another day closer to blurriness. Shall I never return to a world of texture with the ones i formerly loved, in my dreams do I hold the smooth and indiscriminate figure of the memories I can say I once shared and hopefully once acknowledged in a room that wasn’t empty. I hope that there’s still a trust, that there’s still an intimacy in that, though I feel no tumult today if it’s just a state of my own reflection. All that to say, I wish you well. And you, and you, too.