notes from the end of summer

/ on loving

in:

herbal cigarettes (mint, lavender)

devotion

putting weird little things in your hair

sending emails instead of texts

indomitable human spirit

knee-high wide-shaft brown leather boots with kitten heels

having a loud voice (mark of a funny woman)

karaoke bars

pubs with dance floors

normalcy

murder mystery movies

dressing inappropriately for the occasion

scarcity in output

abundance in spirit

out:

categorization

moral puritanism

hierarchy

corset tops

it’s september now, and i keep getting too hot outside. this is because i start dressing for fall weather once i decide that it probably should be fall by now, even though it’s as summer as it was a week ago. so i wear big chunky sweaters and boots and button-down shirts and i sweat and i sweat and i sweat. through it all, i’m comforted by the knowledge that eventually, i’ll be right.

i do the same thing with my period, actually: my period has been seven days long since i was thirteen, but at around five days every month i make the decision that it’s over. it’s a power struggle that i almost always lose — i bleed and i bleed and i bleed. my bathroom towel bar is always full of underwear drying in a neat line, bloodstains faded (only slightly) from scrubbing at them in the sink. my boyfriend always says, can’t you just wait until it’s actually done? and i say he doesn’t get it. it’s the principle of the thing. i’ve always been the type to go out kicking and screaming.

i spent this summer flitting between vancouver and los angeles and new york city, eventually landing in toronto, which is where i live. it was a big move. my life is very different now. my days are wider and emptier, my inbox is fuller, my head feels frantic and cloudy — but i feel like i’m on the precipice of big and exciting things, and failing that, i’m certainly on the precipice of different things, and that’s really all you can ask for. i’ve seen beautiful sights and i’ve been learning how to pigeon-whisper. most of all, i want to be devoted.

here’s my advice: read a book again and again and again, learning something new about it each time. read it five times before you open another one. pick a recipe you love and make it as often as possible, tweaking spices and techniques until it’s perfect and entirely yours. write it out on a notecard each time and put the final product in a rolodex. you can pass these on to your children! scan them for your friends! think of how lovelier that is than sending them a link to a paywalled nyt cooking article.

spend a month watching a great movie. watch the director’s cut and the behind-the-scenes documentary and then watch the films that influenced it and read the director’s favourite book. work to understand things, and not just the things themselves but the conditions that created them and the impact those things had on the world around them. let those things become a part of you instead of a distraction from yourself. i think the act of loving something should be generative and consuming — it should add something to who you are and lead you to a new understanding of all the parts that were already there. when i scroll on tiktok or whatever, i can’t get away from the feeling that almost nothing there is really meant to be loved — it’s just meant to be snorted, basically, and occasionally to get you to buy something.

i remember the feeling of teenage obsession, and i miss it desperately. few things about our everyday lives are more genuinely magical to me than the way that loving something with commitment can rewire your understanding of time: instead of dates or semesters, i can place moments of my early life inside the year where i only read vonnegut, the month i first loved the smiths, the autumn i spent with that rilke poem. it manages to make time physical — it turns it into something that can be tasted and touched. i want my life to be textured by the periods i spent perfecting a stone fruit hot honey cake or watching murder mysteries. wouldn’t it be wonderful to one day taste a cake and remember how you felt in september?

i have many criticisms of rapid-fire, non-stop consumption, but none are so personal to me as this: when we submit to a cultural landscape that tells us to never stop looking for the new shiniest thing, we lose a kind of language for understanding ourselves and others. loving is a muscle that’s been strategically atrophied by a culture of manic consumption and constant availability.

there is so much of everything now that taking your time with one thing — giving it the attention it deserves, when your attention is so valuable a currency — feels like a kind of rebellion. in many ways, i think it is.

i hope your summer was wonderful. i’m going to be here a lot more frequently from now on (this is my whole job now!). ONE LAST THING: now that it’s about to get a little cooler, i really can’t stress enough that you should start putting weird little things in your hair. i carry little clips with me everywhere i go so i can pile my hair with leaves and flowers and ribbons and things, and it’s really made me feel a lot better. if you ever do it, send me a picture.

— xoxo rayne

questions for you (i really would like to know the answers): what is your newest passion? what’s the first thing you can remember really loving? did you go to europe this summer and if so, how (do you have rich parents)? that last one is just because i can’t figure out how so many people went to europe this summer.

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