What Rain Pulls Back

The rain comes in sideways and I think about the umbrella sitting on my desk at home, dry and useless. Summer is dead. With it go the short dresses—other people’s—the melting ice cream cones, the particular willingness to be alive that some people only manage when the sun is out and there’s cold beer involved.

So I do what you do when the season turns and the melancholy rolls in: charge the old iPod, load it with something that fits—quiet melodies, heavy basslines, the specific frequency of a summer that already feels like it happened to someone else. Gregor Schwellenbach, Brolin, Kodacrome. They pull me back into it: forbidden kisses in warm rain, nights that wouldn’t cool down, red mornings after too little sleep. All of it just weeks ago, now felt from across a strange distance.

That’s the thing about autumn. It doesn’t just end summer—it makes summer feel further away than it was. You can still reach it in memory but the cold air insists it was a long time ago, that you were a different person, that whatever happened then is now properly finished.