aftersun (2025)

I used to savor each moment through a prematurely bittersweet lens. Each biology class in grade 12, I’d hyper fixate on this moment, with these friends, knowing all too well that soon we would graduate and I would never talk to that boy I had a crush on, and we would never get the glorified high school experience back. I romanticized and nearly fictionalized high school, but most of it was just boring. This was my high school yearbook quote: “Treasure the experience. Dreams fade away after you wake up.” —Your Name (2016)

But I don’t hold onto my current experiences the same way. I don’t look back on my life a year, or two years, even three years ago with nostalgia. Why was 18 year old me so attached to the past, where 22 year old me only thinks about the future?

I looked at some memories recently. I’ve been realizing more and more how much better life can get. 18 year old me loved nothing better than to daydream, and when the manifestations came to fruition— nothing better than to wake in the middle of the night, whispering on a phone call that would last til dawn. I could not have been more smitten and silly. But I was so, so happy; the euphoria of a first love was not lost on me. I recorded every detail in painstaking precision in my journal, which would torture me for months because I was incapable of forgetting a single thing. Now, I still think of him when I drop my car keys on the ground, and when I catch a certain scent of Tide pods in the air. I don’t have it in me to reminisce, but I do feel that… yearning for my own memories.

For 4 years, I didn’t talk to this person at all. I played with these feelings, but never grabbed it fully, like sand running through my fingers. I wanted to leave it alone, but then I had to do it. I was so curious to know who he is now, and I wanted to be free. For four years, it haunted me in 81 dreams. The bubble is broken, and so are my beliefs in love.

I woke up again at sunrise, lifting the blinds open over my head to see. Today it’s a dusky purple tinged with pink, a touch of red from distant forest fires.

Something in the space behind my eyes twinges in pain, and I’m pulled back down to my bed. I want less. I want to expand inward again. I feel a way I haven’t felt since 18, a naive melancholia, like I’m missing someone or something.

I watched the movie Aftersun yesterday. It’s someone I used to love’s favorite movie. Aftersun is told through the eyes of the adult Sophie, who watches camcorder footage from a vacation she and her father took to Turkey when she was 11. Real and fake memories fill the gaps, and she sees things that are now glaringly obvious: her father’s depression and emotional state.

It feels just like the way I’ve watched my memories from that summer through the dusty windowpane. I’m always worried that each time I touch them they warp into something further from the truth. I wrote about it in a letter to Ayse— she said she felt the optimism of a teenage girl. She noticed the way my words cramped together as I wrote about the “last good day”, the way I didn’t want it to end.

June 22, 2021. It was the last Tuesday of high school and at 9:00 a.m., pleasantly approaching a perfect summer heat. I drove my old car to school as if it were any other day, but waited for him in the parking lot. He wore a pale pink button-down and dress pants, a high schooler’s formal wear in contrast to my embroidered jean shorts and tank top. I tossed him the car keys, and like so many other times before, he dropped them. Then we were off, speeding around the bends and over the hills. The road wound through the forest, under the arches of bent cedars and hemlocks, and up the coastline. The music played a harmony to the wind in my hair.

We walked across the yellow lawn towards the beach, down wooden steps and onto the shifting sand. I kept the parking receipt in my wallet, and now it’s in my box of favourite things. We skipped stones but I didn’t go far enough out. My one regret is not taking off my new, too-nice white leather sneakers and running into the water. The sun exploded into white glares across the water’s surface, and the sea rushes over the shells and rocks.

On the pier we watched the crabbers. The wood of the dock was warm, and we were gently rocked by the waves. I was determined to show him the moon jellies and sea gooseberries, and fish and anemones below the surface. He wondered what type of fish there might be here.

“Probably the normal types of fish… like pike or perch?” I answered.

“Why would those be the normal kind of fish?”

“It’s just a guess.” I’d read about those in a book once— it was set in London, but to me it seemed right. He looked at the sign nailed into the side of the dock.

“Huh, what do you know.”

We were late getting back into the car, and we didn’t care. I leaned over to kiss his cheek. We sat in the half-shaded heat of the late morning, and the flush in my cheeks rose enough to make me look out the window. At the next red light, he brushed my hair off my cheek and kissed it.

We took photos with our friends, with the yearbook camera. We drew portraits in each other’s yearbooks, and he said he wouldn’t write in mine since he’d be seeing me lots this summer. I wished that he would anyway.

~~~

I have almost no photos from this time in my life (because I had no smartphone), but my memories from June to August 2021 are some of the clearest in my mind. I have images in the camera of my mind, paintings, diary entries I tried to read and then I almost threw up, songs.¹ I drew honeysuckle and wrote a note on the back and left it in his coat pocket, a long time ago. I wonder if he still has it. He had never smelled honeysuckle, so I picked a sprig from my garden and gave to him. I see it almost in third person now.

Now the time capsule has been opened. My friend who saw a side of me I’d never known, the only one who’s ever read my favourite book for me. I can never regret this. There will never be a good ending— this is the good ending,

He’s gone now. The person I met yesterday is just a stranger. He’s not who I aspired to be anymore. There was the apathetic, drifting haze before the world opened up around the boxes of conventionality I was used to. I learned you can just do things, if you are ok with accepting the consequences.² I learned how interesting the world can be when you explore it curiously, bravely. It felt so normal to talk again— there just wasn’t anything left to say.

I told him yesterday how I felt that I was a shell back then, barely a person, but he gave my high school self credit: my desires and emotions, feeling strongly. I like that he knows a baser, less refined, imperfect and growing version of me. A version that was joyful, innocent, not jaded, who put 100% into everything. Four years can create two completely different people. He thinks in miles now. I picked up his selfishness— deciding what to do, all the time, for reasons of curiosity and pleasure.

I have been dreaming of love since eight years ago, and I’ve been trying to understand it these past four. There have been too many falls. I can’t tell I’ve ever been in love before, or I have and each time it was terrible. Now I crush my own feelings underfoot, rather than face the embarrassment of having cared about something that’s now stupid and mean. It all blends together and feels numb, or just smoothed over by time? It’s boring to have the same conversations over and over again. But there was something in that moment that only exists once, a euphoric high, like something from a dream. So now I get Before Sunset. I must believe that love really is more than commitment, that it is art, that I can be moved and excited, and really interested by someone.

Sure, what I felt in the past is probably less than I have the capacity to feel now. I feel, I am sure I’ve felt before. I remember rolling on my bedroom floor, screaming at garbage cans, dancing and throwing my fingertips up to catch sunlight. That doesn’t sound much like love, and is love even real? It feels a bit like believing in God— that you just need faith to trust and know it’s out there, you can see its effect on people around you. But also, I don’t know that any of my friends are really in love. Obviously I cannot see or feel what they do, but I’d like to witness something more convincing, at some point. Having an interesting life became more important to me than having a happy one. Siddhartha said love finds you. Let it be out of your control, there is only so much you can do. What was everything these past four years then, if never love?

There are two truths here— the past was meaningful to me, and I felt so strongly, but the present is calm and content and moved on, just right. I would do it all over again, there’s no way I would be who I am without it. I realize now I had expected yesterday to go to the extremes of what things were like four years ago: cold and mean, or a spark reignited.

Then I think about the end. Ayse says in the letter my writing got messier and loopy, like I was trying to get it over with as fast as possible. My stomach and core hurt in a way that made my brow tense and my eyes squint. I spent a whole day wishing I could disappear into one of those tiny holes in the sand where the clams spurt water up into the air, and wishing the sand and sea would swallow me whole. The sun burned red through the smoky haze, and sand grated against my skin, beneath the plastic wrist brace and the sweaty cotton bindings over my stitches. There were too many people there that I didn’t want to talk to, and the one person I did want to see was nowhere. My body felt what was happening, even as my mind raced to spin a story that would deny the truth. I tried my first drink ever that day— a Smirnoff Ice pink lemonade, and tilted my world a little fuzzier and more sour than it was already.

Late after midnight, we finally called and said what we’d been feeling for a while.

“I just don’t feel that way.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,”

I hated to lose him, to not get to talk to him anymore. I hated that this was the end of the sweetness, and the glowing fluttering butterflies. I knew it was going to end somehow, but this felt like the worst way, because I couldn’t hate him. I fell asleep at four in the morning, and woke the next day to the most crying I’d ever done, hopefully ever will do. I cried in my bed, walked outside until the feeling pushed a new storm of tears out, called whatever friend would listen to me, and when they had to hang up I cried again. It was the first time I couldn’t stand the feeling of being inside my own head. I thought I’d finally get to relate to heartbreak songs, but none of them could understand what I felt that day. I enjoyed it in a twisted way, viewing my life as a movie, and knowing that I would never feel this way again.

As we walked up the mountain, he never turned back to look at me, even as I cried out and fell. I don’t even remember half the people who wrote in my yearbook anymore. I’ve never been sure in what I felt again.

When I saw him yesterday, he looked like his teeth were really sharp.

I left it buried at the top of the mountain

1. Cruel Summer, Getaway Car — Taylor Swift

Gross, Favorite Crime — Olivia Rodrigo

China Girl — David Bowie

Date — Radwimps

2. unfortunately some of the consequences of this summer were: a severely injured right thumb (tendon and joint) sliced open by the blade of an ice skate, a year of strained and damaged relationships with my family, the loss of my last competitive youth beach volleyball season, and a year of heartbreak