a summer wasting

the sun always rises.

14 books, a handful of albums, a few loaves of bread, a few dozen hours in video games, two gigs, a handful of happy drunk nights, a 19th birthday, and the summer is coming to an end. No work, no money, no studying. The university knowledge I struggled to learn all of first year has finally leaked away its last drop, ready for me to struggle twice as much in the coming month.

I feel neither happy about the months of nothingness I tried my best to enjoy, or sad about the time wasted. It feels like an inevitable outcome that I’d reach this point in time without having achieved anything worth writing about. There’s no point feeling any way other than bored about it. I come away from the summer with an embarrassingly unreadable short story, a mediocre substack post, a bank account seeping higher and higher in the negative numbers, and a vow that next year I will use the time better, and the knowledge that I never will.

the sunrise in question.

I did have good experiences this summer, and I am grateful for how gently the months have treated me. But the experience that stuck with me the most was something altogether more mundane than a lot of the things I could have written about. Standing on my bed, leaning out my oddly shaped attic windows, cold late-summer morning air rushing past my face and refreshing the damp room behind me. The sun rose slowly. There’s one star burned brightly - the north star, or a planet, I haven’t figured it out yet. It dimmed more with every passing minute. I stood up the whole time, feeling every second of the slow hours crawl by as the light slowly brightened and brightened. I felt the layers of grime that the summer had settled on my brain wash away in the dawn light. I was alone, I hadn’t spoken to another person in a week, at least. But standing from my room at the crest of a hill, seeing the city lights sprawling far below me, dulled by the orange glow of six o’clock sun, it all stopped mattering. My loneliness turned small. My nothing summer was revealed for what it really is: half a drop in the ocean of human history.

There’s no purpose in feeling bad or good about it. It all stopped mattering in that sunrise, and it doesn’t feel like anything’s mattered since. The sun will rise a million more times, and I’ll see a couple of them, I’ll sleep through a fair few, but I’ve already missed billions, I’ll miss billions more, and it doesn’t matter. All I can do is watch when I can.