Someone1 said on Twitter, “I love August, but I always lose something in it.”
Several months ago, I watched La Piscine midday and was naturally enraptured— in part by the vistas of the Cote d’Azur, in part by the thought of languishing in and outside that gorgeous coastal house in late summer, in part by the striking gorgeousness of Schneider and Delon themselves. In part, because I am enraptured by art objects which in general hold a mirror up to my ennui. But I think what got me the most, was that by this time Schneider and Delon had been fully broken up for six years. Their palpable tension on screen was one not of two people in the height of love and lust, but of two people whose fictional (real?) dynamic was jealous and angry and laced with familiar intimacy. Or, two people whose dynamic was tender and nostalgic, two people who would always love each other but always miss each other by an inch, would never be together. What’s sexiest and most engrossing about La Piscine and its stars, is the threat and fulfillment of endings— of love, of (spoiler alert) lives, of summer.
I have preemptively come to terms with endings, with loss, and repeatedly encouraged (or attempted to force) myself to live in the acute delight of the present. I don’t want to hold the fear of the end of love in my mind while I’m in it, but it’s incredibly difficult. I feel a sense of self-awareness or perhaps more accurately a self-consciousness about love that I didn’t feel when I was younger. I still throw myself into things, but I used to be so certain that each big love would last forever. Maybe after a few that didn’t, I’ve become jaded, but I’m still the version of myself that does hope it lasts forever, in one way or another.
It’s an invasion, really, that I am constantly fixated and paranoid that at any moment, the ecstatic dizziness I feel will crash to the concrete. I know my mind. I know that optioning out of such consuming fear is not quite possible for me, at least not yet. And I know that most everyone feels some version of this when in love.
I feel big, obviously. I’m always bowled over by something. Even on absolutely uneventful Mondays, the fact that I have two feet fully on the ground (knock on wood) and feel level is a triumph to be celebrated, sometimes with champagne. (This is not a metaphor, this is truly what I be doing.) These big feelings make me who I am, and also make me dangerously naked and vulnerable to being hurt just as enormously. It’s the dog days, and I am in love with someone who also feels big, and whose feelings are dynamic and mysterious and thrilling and thrilling. To be on the receiving end of them knocks the wind out of me in a way that is shocking and transformative. But I must be aware that even as I am susceptible to being hurt, I am capable of inflicting hurt. There is the dance at the beginning of love of trying to keep some things locked away out of an impulse to protect oneself. But I am always unlatching, racing toward confession and proclamation. The usual trepidations don’t apply. All the same, I feel like I’ve got to be careful, and caring, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
I think working through this is somewhat about accepting that there are little losses around each corner. Little endings. Perhaps accepting this, befriending this fact, will allow me to let go of some of the terror of some all-consuming finality. I asked a friend who is in a relationship how it feels to come to love someone full-time. He responded that he doesn’t know if that’s possible, but in the beginning it sure feels possible. Doesn’t it just.
I’m going to let myself hope that the feeling lasts. I’m not going to shame myself for hoping. I’m also not going to shame myself for the dark and looming anxiety of the end, of loss. And maybe loss can look like shedding skin. And anyway, ends are openings. Ends are beginnings anyway.
I know who it is, I just can’t remember if they got canceled or not, so it’s redacted.