Hi. It’s been forever. We Need to Talk About… is [still] a place where we turn over life’s smooth, shiny rocks and look at the worms crawling underneath. And after a long summer hiatus, we have a lot to discuss. But first:
Emily in Paris. Who knew?! (Everybody. Everybody knew.) I’m late to the game on this one, but that doesn’t change the fact that every time I watch, I feel transported to a world of haute couture and pain au chocolat. I needed a source of vicarious Parisian living after the Olympics ended, and this is it.
I’ve been in a short story mood this summer: reading them, yes, and writing them, too. But! After reading Lauren Groff’s Ghosts and Empties, I feel like I shouldn’t even bother. Put your pens down, everyone! Go home. (Except
. You can stay.) She’s that good. Do yourself a favor and read it.You know how when you open a new browser window, the browser makes suggestions based on your interests? I never click on those, but something made me click on this one from Arthur C. Brooks. It’s a 2021 Atlantic piece entitled Find the Place You Love. Then Move There. (Cue single tear.) As we return from our alternate summer lives and consider how fitting — and how permanent — our real lives actually are, this article feels as timely as ever.
Ah, summer. It has a way of bending time. Heat slows the rhythm of things, daylight spills into night, and before we know it, our clipped efficiency has melted into languid afternoon-evenings drenched in iced tea and citronella.
Sun-kissed and smelling of coconut, we become other selves. Let the email and beach sand pile up. We’ll deal with it later.
It’s later.
The last time we spoke, the school year had just ended. A new one has since begun. And after masterminding months of “summer fun,” we find ourselves free to enter a season of differentiation.
Who were we before we started spending every minute of every day together? What gave us shape before summer melted us all into puddles?
The futility of picking up long-forgotten threads. The pull to look forward instead of back. Though we’re different now, our old commitments beckon.
Writing this feels like responding to an email after too much time has gone by. You know you should get around to it, so you brainstorm a draft whenever you’re on the freeway or in the shower. A day becomes a week, which becomes a month and then two, and the thing you need to do becomes less of priority because the passing of time is directly proportional to the bar you set for quality. After two months of radio silence, the follow-up better be a masterpiece.
Because hustle culture tells us that time is for optimization, rather than gestation.
Which is a lie. Everything is seasonal. Even us.
Summer doesn’t just change the nature of time; it changes the nature of who we are. My older child learned to do cannonballs off a diving board, the younger one how to swim from end to end in her floaty, both children glittering in their newfound independence. I bought my first pair of readers and imagined living in places like the ones we visited in the Northeast and Midwest. Both the readers and the imagining sharpened my field of vision.
Coming home after time away, I’m struck by the arbitrariness of things. How, when we stay in one place, we become that place. Slowly but inevitably. Only by leaving can we perceive how most of the things that keep us busy are not things we actually need to be doing. Change the backdrop, change the players, and realize the assignment of meaning is entirely up to you. As are the priorities.
L.A. feels like a soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. Seductive and problematic, foreign and familiar. I know it, I love it, and I can’t shake the feeling that it’s over. But then, exes have been known to get back together. Besides, I have my family to think about.
Maybe the season of differentiation isn’t so different after all.
“I’ll maintain my slower pace,” I tell myself as the plane descends into LAX, the rhythm of the city below already at odds with my nature-nurtured peace. I know it’s a fiction, but fiction is L.A.’s native language. Maybe I do belong here. Time will tell.