Summer In Passing

Not So Secret Diary

img_1930

“I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then.”

-Lewis Carrol

Lewis, you read my mind. It’s fun to write because each page is a snippet of the person you were in that exact moment when pen hit paper and you couldn’t be anyone else if you tried. I get to flip back through the pages and realize I have no idea if it’s possible to really know myself but I think it’s fun to visit!

Sometimes when I reread my old ramblings I stumble on exactly the sentence I needed to hear. Sometimes those pockets are few and far between so this is my way of taking some of the pages that I found helpful out of the dusty diaries to stick them somewhere easy to find. maybe there’s something useful in here for somebody else too, maybe not, but explore away with me if you’d like!

  • Late Night Thoughts, May 5, 2026

    1. I only feel alive in a way that makes complete sense to me when I’m barely even human and I’ve denied myself sleep till I willingly inhabit a kind of nighttime purgatory in a strange attempt to meet the god that frees my thoughts and makes my pen fly.  I’m in hell’s waiting room waiting for heaven, waiting for the veil to grow deliciously thin, waiting to get close enough to reach out and touch that thing I can’t uncover by any daytime digging.  (on the reason I’ll be groggy in the near morning)
    2. Sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all but is it ever really wrong to tell people you love them? Do they not have a right to know? Are we all walking around loving till it chokes us and being loved in useless silence? (On not knowing the right advice to give a friend) 
    3. I don’t believe there is any kind of person so beloved as an old woman with outrageous stories to tell and unsolicited wisdom to bestow. I don’t think anyone else gets to be quite so close to being magical. Stories beginning with ”honey, let me tell you” and ending with my eyes wide with wonder and my jaw on the floor or moments where an older woman takes my hand, looks me in the eyes, and tells me I’m young and lovely and the world is my oyster, or I’m young and know nothing and should under no circumstances allow myself to be married, will always be filed away in my most religious mental storage unit. My only qualm with these otherworldly women is we only seem to meet in passing and I desire nothing more than a few uninterrupted hours to sit and listen with open ears and a firm acceptance of my own naivete while the mages speak. (on my luckiest of chance encounters)
    4. I don’t bite my nails anymore. Years of attempting to coax the habit away just to look down and realize weeks have passed and my fingers are unbitten and I didn’t have to try, I simply forgot I ever wanted to. It’s one of the many ways I find I am forgetting myself. I like it but I despise how little control I hold over the matter. One cannot remind themselves to forget. (on growing up)
    5. Oh joy, oh love, oh desire, oh loss, oh my! I am a spinning top and a wheel stuck in the mud and I can’t keep my eyes off the ever-changing moon above me but I’m always tripping on my shoelaces and I never seem to take the time to tie them properly and I refuse the other option of casting my gaze down when I’m walking. I refuse to feel earthbound. (On enjoying a life in the clouds and quite literally stumbling a lot on my walk this evening)


    March 26, 2026

    “Gertrude and I”

    When I have too much time on my hands and not enough self control to make anything of it my mind wanders to places it has no right to go. Yesterday I laughed out loud in my car in which I was procrastinating the very short walk back to my apartment, all because I caught myself thinking, genuinely pondering, if I might never be as creative as I was in childhood. So much of that inspiration was borne from years of loneliness, turns out having no friends is an underrated way to feel like the world desperately needs you to be a melancholy 13 year old poet! I grew up a little and have been blessed with a handful of priceless friendships and to my horror even achieving a lifetime wish is still grounds for self critique if you sit in a parked car for long enough. 

    I loved the laugh that accompanied the insanity. No part of me believes that I’d take the desperate creativity over the love. The world will be more than fine without me as it’s poet. We all wish we could scour ourselves of each bad habit and each well worn treacherous mental pathway but that wish will never allow you to feel clean. If you laugh at yourself in all your grimy strangeness you get to keep being unusual without the endless scrubbing at the pieces that might never come off and you get to turn them into one of the most valuable things of all: daily fodder for comedy. 

    I adopted a clinically obese cat as a teenager and she was the light of my life for years. She had a harsh meow that ricocheted through doors and up stairs and often disgustingly early hours of the morning, she destroyed every valuable piece of furniture in my family home, she was too large to reach her own back to clean it and I had to groom it for her, she loved me only when she saw fit and never when I craved her stoic attention. Every time I told a guest to the house her name, Gertrude, they would huff a laugh and say something along the lines of,

    “I think that’s the only name a cat like her could have.”

    She was a cranky old lady and a health hazard to herself. She would chew on anything, and if it was inedible, she loved to put the cherry on top by swallowing too. I adored her and my reason may be clouded, but it always seemed to me she showed me the most affection when I was down in the dumps and needed a purring cat more than anything in the world. 

    My point isn’t that she had enough good qualities to make the strange ones loveable, it’s that my favorite bits of her were the freakish ones. Being awoken at 3 AM to a feline screech and pleading with heaven to ‘please god let her shut up and I’ll be a really good person for the rest of my life’ was a grand time to be alive. I liked how she rolled on her back in the dead center of family reunions like she wanted to show as many people as possible that she was a LOT of cat. I liked everything about her and if she was a more palatable pet she wouldn’t have been my Gertrude. That’s not to say we didn’t put her on diets to try and extend her life or that we didn’t try to teach her how to climb up a full flight of stairs without giving up, it just means I loved her and all her weight loss failures and she was worth every one of the vain efforts. She is long gone but lives on every holiday back at home where we always seem to end up in a bout of laughter over the dear old cat we miss so well.

    If I was loved, or loved myself, the way I loved Gertrude, I’d be perfectly content. I think loving yourself that way is the only way we can do it without latching on to some shiny beacon of ‘Who you can be if you just do these 500 things we all know you won’t be doing!’. We’re all fat cats with behaviors worthy of a little comedic ridicule and we all must take our purring selves into our own welcoming arms at night. It’s all in good fun when you’re just Gertrude.

    The lady Gertrude

    ………………………………………………………………………

    September 2, 2024

    Birthday Nostalgia

    [I wrote this on my 19th birthday, a happy day but one that fell right after a move across the country]

    The sunny lucid dream that is my childhood bedroom cannot seem to stop rearing it’s haunting head! Drawing comparisons between life then and life now is addictive to the sentimental but given free reign in my home-tethered heart it is all consuming. Echoes of stomachache laughter and nights spent devouring book after book send sparks of unwelcome urgency up my spine. Time is a looming concept best dealt with in small manageable doses but birthdays always seem to bring it in waves.

    The Lavender bushes wafting serene sweetness through that once open window and being awoken by a clattering kitchen that promised a hot breakfast soon to come; it rings of a happy home, a blessed beginning. Despite the wash of gratitude at the memory it’s difficult to fight the hideous truth of the starkly contrasted unpredictable life that is my new reality. It’s hard to not let the comparisons take root and sour this day of celebration.

    The strangers who now inhabit that old space, the old home, are alien, feel unwelcome. Their faces are shrouded in shadow as my minds’ eye watches that sacred ground fall into disrepair (or worse, a state of remodel), unworshipped as it should have been. I hear ghosts of little feet running pitter-patter down the halls, holidays spent together, precious time lived within a world tiny enough to be fully encapsulated by blissful ignorance.

    Longing to return is a slippery slope, a path which can blind and a trail notoriously difficult to retrace back into the real world. The rosy sheen of memories’ magic has buffed away any dry-cracked edges of the days within those well-loved walls, the unavoidable pains of early existence willed away with time in favor of more pleasant mental cargo. I hold dear the fact that love was never a finite resource in that little house. We were grass stained and free in that sunny yard, laughed endlessly at the dinner table, spent countless evenings begging for one more chapter to be read aloud by the fireplace, and peaceful in our togetherness when night came.

    To go back is impossible, to relive is insanity, to remember is the sweetest of agonies. I don’t long, not really, for that simple routine of youth, I long for one more day ending with that invisible blanket of safety that tucked us in each night. The world seemed to revolve around our little snow globe of a life back then, when beyond stretched only as far as a bike ride to the end of the road and the thought of anything changing never crossed my mind. I treasure it all dearly!

    Happy birthday to me!

    [A year and a half later i can say this place feels like home but little reminders of the old one, like this picture, will always be around!]

    ………………………………………………………………………….

    March 22, 2026

    Moths I Guess

    I might go to church tomorrow, might read my horoscope for a time, might let my mother pray with me (might even close my eyes while she does it for once), might let myself see signs in everything. If the weight of the world rests on my shoulders one night I might be forced to my knees to plead with a god, any god, to let me stop feeling like Atlas.

    I’ll let the tarot cards hold all the answers, let my Gemini moon mean ‘Love is in the air!” on some meaningless utterly unromantic Monday, let someone tell me what’s meant for me will always find me in the end; I won’t scoff, even internally. I won’t rationalize or laugh at myself for this acceptance of every illogical contradictory thing all at once. 
    There are days that must happen to you and times where logic has no seat at the table. I have surprised myself by embracing this temporary search for divine reason because I know it won’t last. A morning will dawn where the newness of the season won’t register as something sharp and violent, a morning where the newborn light cutting through my closed blinds will be soft and buttery and beautiful enough to tilt the scales from fear to hope. The reckless search for someone or something to tell me why it’s all worth it, why to believe in future joys, why to trust there is another force beyond my own lacking willpower, the search for all of it will fade as quickly as it arrived. I know it to be true because I know a day will come when I regain my own sight. Albeit not divine, the sight that’s always allowed me to see a whole lot of magic in this regular old life of mine will return to me and it will be a welcome day of celebration. 

    Not so long ago, not long at all, I would have written something wide eyed and grateful about how miraculous it is that a life so small is still filled to the brim with moments and notions and people and pages that feel damn near heavenly. That wasn’t another person despite the distance I feel from her. It was me, therefore it is me, therefore I can unearth her sight once again.*

    * [let’s just choose not to question this logic.]

    It’s a time I can only describe as the dead of night as I’m writing this and I’ve been camped out on the sprawling steps of the catholic church down the road. I’m not catholic, I didn’t come here to feel close to god or to feel holy, I came here because it’s the kind of beautiful empty place I would have found romantic in all its serenity just a few dead-of-nights ago. Beautiful places have always held a roundabout kind of religiousness for me and I think on this day where I have felt so stricken I just wanted to feel awestruck.
    Across the street a swarm of moths is dancing around the big yellow street lights that have given me enough light to scribble my nonsense at this hour. A fact of nature: these things absolutely love light. However, today of all days, my mind circles the idea that all of us seem to want nothing more than to fly, to swarm, to dance, as close as possible to the biggest brightest thing we can imagine. I may be too far gone down the nonsense drain now and you can call me Icarus or a lousy atheist or a rambling heartsick fool who shouldn’t be allowed within ten feet of a pen but I’m sitting on very uncomfortable stone steps right now and no part of me cares to move because I daresay these moths are a teeny tiny part of a teeny tiny life and I daresay I’m seeing a little magic in them. I think my sight will return. I think I’m beginning to stitch this wound of a day, I think I’ll eventually get off these stairs and regain feeling in my legs, I think I’ll read my horoscope tomorrow. 

    ………………………………………………………………………………………..
    More to follow, thanks friends ;)