No Love in Summer

The last few weeks had been the kind of hot where you stop making plans and start making excuses—sweating through everything, feeling personally wronged by the weather in a way that’s irrational and completely correct. Not the clean heat of a good summer but the stifling, muggy, existentially unfair kind. You look for bodies to drag through it with you. String lights strung across some balcony, cheap red wine, music that sounds better than it has any right to at two in the morning. You find companionship. You don’t find love.

I’ve noticed, over years of paying attention to my own patterns, that every relationship I’ve had started in autumn. Every single one, without exception. Not because I’m the kind of man who fucks around all summer and then wants something to hold onto when it gets cold—though I understand how it could look that way from the outside. It’s more that summer is when I go looking for myself, and by September I’ve made enough peace with that failure to be genuinely present for someone else. The search exhausts you into openness.

When the evenings cool and the light starts to change—that specific amber quality late September has, leaves starting to turn—she’s usually already there. Waiting at what I think of as the entrance to that season: red leaves, slower walks, conversations that go somewhere. I take her arm and we go a while together. I love her completely and simultaneously start grieving it, because I know that by the time winter lifts again we’ll be heading in different directions. That knowledge doesn’t stop anything. It might even make things sharper.

What summer actually is, underneath all its mythology, is a long argument with yourself that you never win. You come back from it with a basket full of memories and a few conclusions that feel solid for about a week. Then the evenings cool, something in you softens, and you let someone in.

There is no love in summer. But there’s everything else.