Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

By Cate Murphy

Summer is my favorite time of year. 

It’s the only season that seems to give permission for idleness, and not the guilty kind either. Laying flat on the grass or stretched out on a faded beach towel, paperback in hand, hours bleeding into each other, it feels not only acceptable but righteous. If you’re outside, the logic goes, you’re doing something, even if that something is absolutely nothing. There’s also the freedom of abandoning little routines you thought you couldn’t live without. For me, the endless rotation of foundation, concealer, bronzer–all gone. Instead, the sun does the work. A few hours in the daylight, and your skin glows with an organic blush, as if the rays are complicit in your vanity. Even hair, unruly and damp looks intentional in the summer. Everything softens. You are softer, too. Moods lift. Days stretch longer, into a light that never dims. Life itself feels lighter, as if burdens melt under the heat. Summer, more than any other season, carries the charge of rebirth. But it’s a fragile one, already decaying by the time it begins.

Last summer, my rebirth wasn’t solitary–it was tethered to someone else. 

A person who became the entire framework of those months, so much so that when I recall the season, I can’t remember myself apart from them. The sunlit days, the humid nights, and those lazy afternoons with cicadas whining in the background, each of them is overlaid with the echo of their presence. The story of last summer really begins in June. The days were still finding their heat, not yet oppressive, just promising. I met them at a timid social gathering, one of those parties where no one knows exactly whose birthday it is but everyone drinks like they do. They leaned against the railing, half in shadow, half illuminated by those string lights that never work properly. Conversation came easy. Or maybe it wasn’t conversation so much as the suspension of it. Those long stretches of silence that didn’t feel awkward, the kind of pauses that feel like doors opening rather than shutting. I don’t remember what we talked about. I only remember the hum of potential, the feeling that something was about to begin. 

By July, everything was accelerated. We fell into each other’s routines until we had no routines anymore. Mornings blurred into afternoons blurred into nights. We lived in an orbit of parks, coffee shops, and dim apartments with fans rattling in the window. We took endless walks just to be moving, as if the act of being in motion together was the real point. The world shrank to encompass  only the two of us. My friends grew accustomed to my absence. My phone buzzed less and less, and I didn’t notice. Summer makes it easy to be selfish; everything outside your immediate experience fades into irrelevance. There’s something intoxicating about that intensity, the way it convinces you it could never fade. Even as I felt myself slipping deeper into dependence, I didn’t mind. It was  surrendering to something inevitable, something bigger than the careful boundaries I normally carried. 

But inevitability is a trick of the season. 

By September, the nights cooled. Our energy frayed. The conversations thinned, the silences grew heavier. The exaggerated selves we had been–reckless, radiant–sputtered in the shorter days. Without the heat, without the light, we were just people again. And that wasn’t enough. We didn’t fight, there was no dramatic ending, no stormy scene. Just a quiet drifting, like the tide retreating without anyone noticing until the sand is bare. One day, I realized I hadn’t spoken to them in weeks. I stopped expecting to. It’s strange to think of how central someone can be, only to vanish without residue. But then again, maybe the residue is me, the version of myself that summer carved out. A version I might not see in the mirror come winter, but one that existed, briefly, undeniably. 

And yet, by autumn, the tether snapped. 

The person disappeared, or I did. It doesn’t matter who left first. What matters is that our attachment was absolute, until it wasn’t. That is the strangeness of summer: how completely it consumes, yet how cleanly it can vanish. I tried to explain this the other week, walking with an old friend down a tree-lined street where fallen leaves crunched underfoot. I was describing what felt like a double life, the way summer transforms me into a more reckless, more radiant version of myself. My friend tilted her head and laughed. “So basically you’re unhinged for three months,” she said. I suppose so. But it’s more than that. It’s not just indulgence or carelessness, it’s exaggeration. I’m more likely to say yes to everything, to stay out too late, to spend mornings recovering on balconies with iced coffee sweating in my hand. More likely to attach myself to someone with an intensity that would scare me in December. 

There’s a reason, I think, that summer flings are clichés. They belong to the season that encourages blurring: of rules, of expectations, of identities. You can slip out of the skin you’ve been dragging around since January and put on a new one, shimmering, though already peeling at the edges. The person you become is not the everyday version, but rather, the expanded edition, the “feral” side, the one that only exists under a sun that doesn’t set until nine. 

But then comes autumn. The air sharpens, nights arrive sooner, and suddenly, there’s the question: who are you when the season turns? Do you snap back like an elastic band to the winter version of yourself? Or does some trace of the summer self remain, lingering in freckles that fade too slowly? Is there even such a thing as a “true” self? Or are we all seasonal versions, shifting slightly depending on the light, the weather, the company we keep? I’ve stopped pretending I know the answer, and you should too. I do know this: the end of summer is the best time of all. It’s the moment of ambiguity, when skin glows but you can’t tell if it’s the soft blush of a brand or the harsh red of a burn. That edge between vitality and damage, between beauty and pain. When I say “summer is my favorite season,” maybe that’s what I really mean. Not the weather, not the iced drinks, not even the books devoured in the sun. But the permission it gives to become someone else, to try on another skin, to blur the line between burns and blush. The thing about blush is that it fades. By October, my cheeks were pale again. I bought a branded compact  from the drugstore, applied it in the bathroom mirror before meeting friends I hadn’t seen all season. They teased me–“back from the dead,” they said–and maybe they weren’t wrong. But here’s the part I didn’t admit to them: I missed that summer version of myself. I missed the recklessness, the intensity, the willingness to be consumed. Even if it wasn’t sustainable, even if it wasn’t healthy, it was alive and it was vivid. Sometimes, when I’m walking home on a cold evening, I catch sight of myself in a shop window and wonder if she’s  still there, buried under sweaters and routine. Maybe she’s waiting for the next June, the next stretch of heat to coax her out. Maybe she’s not gone at all–just seasonal, like everything else. And when she does return, I’ll know by the same telltale sign: the cheeks flushed by sunlight and the ambiguous glow. Burnt or blush…it’s hard to know, until the peeling begins.