Summer is for falling in love

How to understand that lump in your throat

delicious oil painting by Erica Lee Sears

I was sitting on top of him in a little birch cabin. The main appeal of these things is that it’s tiny and one of the four walls is a huge window. You know the ones. I want to say I was straddling him, but that makes it sound too sexual, which it was, but almost by accident because we were laughing and fully clothed, like we’d just happened to find ourselves in this position. I could see it in his eyes and feel it caught like a lump in his throat. He was glowing and I know I was too. We held the tension for the perfect amount of time but now I wish it lasted longer. We’d both been thinking it for a time, maybe a few weeks, and then he said it.

“I think I love you.”

What I would give to go back to this moment, especially knowing all that's to come. The briefness of falling in love is kind of devastating.

I said it back, kind of. I said, “Your face looks like the moon.”

(I genuinely do not think these were the mushrooms talking.)

I didn’t mean that moon, I meant this one.

It’s a little ceramic piece of art that I fell in love with while I was wandering around Colorado Springs years ago. It felt like a good omen. Something about this moon feels so full of joy and hope and safety.

Telling a man, “I feel safe with you” is probably more powerful than telling him “I love you.”

Especially for people like me. I can fall in love in seconds. I can fall in love with people and ideas and inanimate objects. I thought I was going to marry every person I dated. There is nothing I enjoyed more than going on an “okay” first date at Lido, ordering the grilled tuscan crostini, and then walking home and being like, well I guess what if I just met my husband? I’d imagine our lives and the way we’d tell the story of our first date.

Was it love at first sight kids? No!

I’d imagine the character I become. Like how great I’d be at dealing with his celiac or how much fun we’d have at cubs games even though I don’t care about that at all. Most times we wouldn’t make it to the second date but sometimes we would go on a third or fourth and then sometimes I’d be meeting his parents even though I knew it wasn’t going to work out. (Are other people like this?) I knew it was wrong but I was still happy to have the experience.

This is what summer is for. Especially summer in New York. Summer is for bare shoulders and backs of knees and saying yes to everything, even fantasizing about the life you don’t actually want. Summer is for feeling free.

The summer I met my husband was one of the best. I’ll never forget how absolutely beautiful I felt waking up in that cabin next to him. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more free in my life.

I love remembering that summer but it also makes me sad. It’s a weird thing about going through stages of a relationship. I love him more but I also love him less. I know him now, like in a very real and deep way. Pushing our child out of my body while he was holding onto my limp leg and feeding me ice chips makes me absolutely certain that I will never have this kind of connection with anyone else. That post baby clarity is crazy.

But then it's rare that he looks at me the way he did in that cabin. It’s rare that I see the moon in him. Sometimes, in flashes, but it's rare. We’re not all over each other. We rarely sext anymore. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever have fun like we did that first summer we fell in love. And yet, ideally, I’ve got the rest of my life to spend growing with and getting to know new versions of this person.

I guess this is where the age-old advice for sad girls leaving summer camp comes in, “don’t cry because it's over, smile because it happened.” I have surprisingly never resonated with this advice even though all I want to do is smile. I’m a bubbly kind of a person. Glass half full more like glass overflowing. I’m lucky, like happy go lucky and regular lucky. I’m optimistic. I believe that reaching out to strangers is a genuinely fun way to spend time. I get excited easily and I hate being angry. I don’t like to hold grudges unless it’s absolutely necessary. When people meet me I would like for them to feel like it's a good omen.

Feeling sad or annoyed or angry is not my “thing” yet a few days ago I screamed into my hands in a public park to let out the feeling rising in my chest that made me want to cry. I feel the need to lighten this by telling you I’m not crazy and explain that the scream was requested by my mentor who sensed my frustration. (One thing you should absolutely do if you’re interested in reaching out is ask someone you admire to be your mentor.)

I said, “I’m in a public park so I kind of can’t” and then he said, “cover your mouth with your hands then.” So I did.

Sometimes change is the most beautiful thing that's ever happened but sometimes it does get caught like a lump in your throat and you’re like how did I get here. Last summer I got pregnant on accident (whoops). This summer I have a 5 month old (whoa). Everything has changed but not everything in me has caught up to it.

The feeling of all this pressing down on me is familiar, of course. I feel it when I’m overwhelmed by beauty and regret and nostalgia.

There is tightness about it, like if emotion grew teeth and started pressing upward. It hums at a very specific frequency. I know you know it too. It’s like your body's way of being poetic. Throbbing with the pressure of being human.

But it’s complicated because everything is “good.” Everything is “great actually.” Which is part of it? I can’t understand it.

And how could I when everything in me wants to stop writing this and open up another tab to look for summer haircuts on Pinterest.

There is a part of me that doesn’t want to understand it because it is uncomfortable. But let me try.

The lump in my throat:

There are some bits of grief in there. Like the grief that you can’t quite grasp onto or explain. It’s deceiving. Like that crane game with the metal claw at the end. It always looks easy to direct it to the panda with its head literally sticking out, but somehow it's impossible. That game is nasty.

I’m afraid of being normal or grounded or content. In the life I fear, I’m not unique at all. I go through the motions everyone around me seems to go through too. The air feels hazy and stagnant. There are moments I catch myself dreaming about the other lives I could’ve had through all the sliding doors my 20s presented me, and which one I'd pick if I could go back in time. In this life, I forget what it feels like to fall in love. My life becomes boring. And the worst part is “everything is great, actually.”

I keep asking the impossible question (enneagram 7 in me is haunted by this): What if I’m missing out on the best version of life?

But, in the life I dream of I have freedom and fulfillment. I wake up before the sun and creep around my house so I don’t wake anyone. I ride my bike to work where I make cool things with cool people. I am an artist. I have routines and rituals, but I always have something new and interesting cooking. And the best part is, I’m able to sit inside discomfort, and even enjoy it a little bit.

The lump in my throat has come to tell me something:

Don’t run away. Wanting to love yourself and also wanting to change yourself is trying to show you something.

The longer you can sit beside your grief and discomfort, the more you can find joy in it. And when you can find joy in it you will find something very beautiful inside.

It’s saying, the desire to fall in love again this summer is not stupid because summer is for falling in love damn it. And falling in love is a good omen.

~the end / thanks / buttons~

Thank you to

Sasha Chapin

for the mentorship and editorial help <3