Goodbye, August

How to enjoy the next seven days. Also, I'm gifting students a one-year subscription.

Happy back to school (soon)!!!

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Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’m writing this as I wait for my (delayed) flight to Brooklyn, where I’ll be spending the last week of August, 2025. I just finished a bowl of oatmeal and a bacon sandwich. I feel my political orientation inch rightward as the paper straw in my juice disintegrates rapidly.

from twitter

August is the Sunday of months. There’s an ancestral feeling of transition, from toil to harvest, from dreams to realizations. The soul wants to slow down, the body wants to rest, the mind wants to wander to different neverlands, all of them thousands of miles apart. The hands are idle. The heart is sleepy. The eyes are relaxed. The stone fruits are so ripe you can smell them through the plastic bag. The afternoons are too stuffy, too hot. People are booking their travels, either to go home or to find their last opportunity to get out before the plot reinvents itself.

August. The Janus who stands in the doorway of seasons, smiling with both welcome and warning because it’s a feast day for nostalgia, for the uncanny awareness that summer bliss is already a memory. The last week of August makes you live in two times at once, in that thin seam where abundance and loss pour out from the same cup.

Gelato. Celtuce. Cicada. Marigold. Sprinklers. Cornsilk. Moonrise. Languor. Rereading books. Rewatching movies. Saturation. Existential nausea. August. August. August.

Then comes September, the true New Year. January 1st is a glitter-and-champagne Gregorian spectacle meant to distract you from the dead weight of winter. September is the true rebirth. Soon, the air will thin and sharpen. The breeze will mimic the effect of caffeine. The mornings will start to smell like possibilities.

When I was a student, September meant binders and the pleasure of writing my name on the front of papers. I thought that ritual would disappear after graduation, but it hasn’t, and it makes me think that this rhythm is more archetypal than cultural and social. When September hits, I’ll want to reset everything—clean the entire house, change my hair, make promises. For now, I want to enjoy the last week of August:

Do not brace for the end.

Resist the tools of anticipation—countdowns, calendars, checklists. Treat it as a room with no clocks. Don’t try to “make the most” of it because those are extraction verbs, and this week will not be mined. The more you try to suck the marrow out of August, the more you lose time over-engineering what you could be enjoying. Instead, let it linger. It is both here and not here—you’re okay with leaving summer, and you’re okay with the upcoming renaissance.

August is a thirty-one-course omakase: eaten one piece at a time, in an order you don’t get to decide, and put straight into your mouth by the hands of the universe. You are not storing these for later (you can’t). August is about moving through water or a cloud or something, like the moments before falling asleep that you can never remember no matter how hard you try when you wake up the next morning. And you will wake up again, so, do not brace for the end.

Disregard sequence.

August is not linear. Have breakfast for dinner, read the first chapter of five different novels and forget about them for the next five years. Let the hours feel slightly out of order, like you’ve lost the script. This week is the closest the year comes to being unsupervised, and you should use that looseness to test what still feels alive when you take away its usual frame. Summon the alter ego: be someone else, wear a color you usually don’t, try a new cuisine, etc.. Also, resist the urge to document. Ditch the journal. This is the month for moments that will survive only if they can carry themselves. It’s survival of the most vivid and most meaningful.

Embrace excess.

In August, things grow past their own proportions. I’ve seen vines drooping to the dirt from the weight of their grapes, I’ve breathed air so humid and thick with heat it feels heavy enough to have a texture, and I’ve had conversations that wander three stories and seven tangents past the point. Don’t trim it back. Leave the table set for more guests than you expect (and you might find that you still don’t have enough chairs). Show too much skin, no one is going to remember by the time September 1st hits. Invite the unnecessary; it will make the necessary less brittle and more interesting when it returns.

Eat more vegetables.

August is the only month where they taste the most like themselves—like the place they were grown, like the weather that made them. Pile your plate until it looks like “a lot”, until you feel the weight of their colors. Especially these:

• Corn

• Tomatoes

• Zucchini

• Eggplant

• Bell peppers

• Cucumbers

• Green beans

• Summer squash

Offer something back.

This is your last chance to mark August with something that leaves no trace. In the myth, Orpheus stood at the threshold of the underworld, the hinge between death and life, and the act of turning back marked him forever. It’s not the underworld that remembers him; it’s his own memory that he takes away from the moment. The end of August feels like the beginning of a transformation that exists for whoever notices it and chooses to mark it. August doesn’t care about its travellers. The transition between seasons will not remember you, but the act of marking it will change the way you remember yourself.

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When the temperature drops, you’ll be able to see clearly again. You’ll notice things without rosiness, like pet hair on the floorboards or the stack of books you said you’d finish this year. Life will steady itself, and the steadiness will feel like a new beginning. Soon, September will prove that beginnings are also judgments—it’ll offer both potentiality and mortality, giving you both ambition and the feeling that time is running out. The days will shorten and the future will press in. But, all year long, this will be the moment you’ve been waiting for to try again.