The Summer Without You !free! 〈2025-2027〉

I did not cry when I packed the boxes. I had run out of tears sometime in the second week of August, during a thunderstorm that knocked out the power and left me sitting in the dark, listening to the rain hammer the roof, thinking: This is the sound of the world washing itself clean, and I am still here.

Mowing the lawn became an act of archaeology. I found the divot in the grass where you used to rest your foot while tying your shoes. Watering your tomato plants felt like a heresy—I was keeping something alive that you had started. And yet, to let them wilt would be to admit you were never coming back to eat them, salted and raw, juice running down your chin. the summer without you

The routines we shared became haunted houses. Making lemonade without your instruction to add “just a whisper more sugar” produced a drink that was technically correct but spiritually bankrupt. We do not realize how much of love is ritual until the ritual has no priest. I did not cry when I packed the boxes

Rescue came from a place I did not expect: not from friends (who offered casseroles and clichés), not from time (which moved like molasses), but from a single, feral cat. A mangy orange tabby began appearing on the back steps in late July. It had no collar and one torn ear. You would have hated it. You were a dog person, loyal and uncomplicated. I found the divot in the grass where

That, I think, was the lesson the summer was trying to teach me: the universe is not cruel. It is simply busy. It has no time for our individual apocalypses.

I stopped sleeping indoors. For three weeks, I took your place on the porch swing, wrapped in the wool blanket that still smelled faintly of your bay rum cologne. I stared at the constellations you taught me—Orion’s belt, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia’s W—and tried to understand how the sky could be so indifferent. The stars did not rearrange themselves in your absence. The moon did not apologize for rising.

I named him Proust, because he made me remember things involuntarily.