The First Summer (2025)
visual autofictions vol. 4

Every summer feels like the first summer.
Each August, I rediscover that I don’t do well in the heat.

There is one moment, long ago, that I carry with me everywhere. I lie in a linen hammock, soft with use. I am suspended by branches that hold ripening pears. I touch the ground with my hand. In the distance are the sounds of late summer — voices, laughter, insects, birds, harvesting machines. Together it sounds like almost-ending-yet-still-here. The other children pick peas from the garden and eat them straight from the pods. The air smells sweet and faintly like hay. In the hammock, I think: This will be my anchor. Pull me back when all else fails.

In September, I watch the colours fade.
In September, you can’t deny the change.
In September, I don’t know why, you put me on a pedestal and tell me who I am. But everything there is to say has been said before, so I stay silent. Everything there is to say, and everything there is to be said has already been said, and can just be reordered into endless, meaningless but coherent strings of texts by large language models that I keep reading late into the night, on and on, in hopes of learning some truth about the fuzzy difference between aesthetics and morality until I fall asleep.

Maybe it was an LLM, maybe it was Sappho, who said:

But I love extravagance
And wanting it has handed down
The glitter and glamour of the sun
As my inheritance

In September, the light is the most beautiful, made for those who don’t want to let go.

In October, inevitably, it is revealed: I am not, in fact, who you want me to be.
I touch the ground with my hand, for the first time, again.