August is, objectively, the worst time of the year. I have never met a single August that did not make me feel very maudlin, very sad.
It’s a month-long school night. It’s the day after Christmas. It’s a quiet, tired drive home. It’s the eighth period before a ninth-period exam. It’s a tattered going-out-of-business-sale sign hanging off the exterior of a mattress store within a desolate strip mall, within a post-industrial suburban town. (It’s the smell inside the strip mall, too. The floors!) It’s finding sand in your bag in the middle of November. It’s getting out of a movie at 2 p.m. It’s waiting, mourning the last hour of a playdate before someone comes to take you home, ruining the fun.
It’s basically a 31-day slog of living at the edges of endings — or, I guess, by this age, living inside the memories of things that ended a very long time ago.
In August, every glimpse of 3 p.m. sun, every Sunday, every buggy nighttime walk is like an invitation into some private room of reflective disembowelment. If I accept the invitation, all of those moments that are typically nice — like, if they were in June, they’d be nice — are tinged with a sense of not-having, or not being “there,” even while I really, literally, am “there.” Watching the sky bruise in yellows and purples at dusk, swimming in a body of water, feeling the sun cook your arms. The beautiful parts of summer become bloated with an uncapturable and childlike… melancholy. Do we all feel like this????
There is a part in Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, after he suffers a loss (no spoilers!!!!), where he articulates what August has felt like to me:
“It’s always what they say on the days when you have a really keen sense of being lost, or losing something, that it often feels like the sun shines the brightest. And then the next day, there was a really sunny day with a good breeze. And I just remember thinking: ‘If I was somebody else, I would really be enjoying this.’”
(Reading the text on a screen doesn’t do the scene justice; you have to hear the words in his squeaky little voice. I was totally losing it when I watched this on a plane — I cried big fat tears the whole time!!!!)
I didn’t suffer a loss like Marcel in August (beyond the loss we all endure at summer’s end). And I did enjoy the sunshine, the breeze, being alive generally, etc. But I just think he gets at something very sweet and true about sitting in a moment that should make you feel very alive and still not being able to inhabit it fully. Maybe it’s not wishing you were somebody else — but thinking that maybe, if you were yourself from two months ago, or 15 years ago, or five years from now, you’d be completely, comfortably inside it. A Problem With The Present!!!!!
More than New Year’s, which at least has big parties and fun outfits going for it, August’s forced endings usher in all of the stupid sentimentality of times gone by, but with a sort of hollowness underneath them, because what we have to look forward to appears fuzzy, or unclear, or not all that different from the days we just lived. The break in time isn’t clean, but it’s loud and in your face the whole month — in back-to-school commercials and Labor Day Weekend car sales and 60-degree mornings.
And this all prompts me — and I assume, many others, due to marking our years by the academic calendar for the first decades of our lives — to take stock of all the ways I’ve changed, run the numbers against all of the ways I haven’t, and then see if the difference is anything worth being proud of.
This summer, I meant to write the Egg Report every week, but clearly I didn’t. Unsurprisingly, I ran out of things to say (or think?) rather quickly. I meant to really put my head down on my novel, and I didn’t do that either. A chapter here or there. I meant to tackle my fear of Citibiking, which I did only twice (and the first time, it wasn’t really up to me). I meant to meditate every day. (I did that for June and have since let the Headspace app sit untouched on my phone.) I meant to write two short stories; I half-started one and abandoned the other.
I meant to do a lot of things, and all told, the only thing I actually did accomplish on my overzealous, personal-growth bucket list was learn how to soft-boil an egg — something that does not realistically take three months to perfect, and a feat that many people achieve at an earlier life stage, likely without all the waxing on about time or mental breakdowns whatever I thought I was doing in some of those blogs. For the rest of my life, even when I’m like, 50 (if I make it that far), I will look back on this season and it will not bear the mark of any major milestone that typically defines a summer — the One Where You Fell In Love, the One Where You Got Dumped (that, in a way, can be an accomplishment..), the One Where You Got A Job, the One Where You Moved Across The Country, the One Where You Turned Pretty. It will be the One Where I Ate A Lot Of Eggs And Perhaps Did Something Questionable To My Cholesterol Levels. Okay… like, rock on, I guess. And the rub of it all? I don’t even want to eat eggs that much anymore.
I still make them for lunch about three times a week, but I’ve lost interest in the process, both literally (they don’t do much for me, taste-wise, anymore) and spiritually. Either I’ve run the metaphor well dry or I’ve become creatively celibate or there are more important, urgent things to consider (probably a mixture of those last two, which is not good given the arts education I am currently betting a six-figure sum on making into something life-sustaining! xD), but I no longer see stories, or questions, or curiosities worth pursuing in my eggs.
Even in writing this, I thought: there HAS to be some tie-in here — some thin strand between eggs and August and the false finality of the month that I could stretch into 600 words.
And well … I realized eggs are more naturally analogous to beginnings! Isn’t that quaint. Perhaps all is not lost. Perhaps, there are a few little drops left in the well!
In parting, I will share three somewhat memorable interactions with eggs over the past month. Maybe I will come back to this series one day — but likely not for a while, as tomorrow I return to the humiliation ritual that is my MFA program. (Just kidding, I’m having a Good Time!)
Thanks to the, like, 16 of you who read the Egg Report. This was fun. <3
FAILURE
I went through almost this entire journey without accidentally breaking an egg. Then boom!
I had rested this egg next to the pot as the water boiled, and must have forgotten that, due to the shape of an egg, you can’t just put it on a flat surface and expect it to stay in exactly the same spot. After setting this egg down, I turned back to preparing my salad, at which point I guess the little egg careened right off the counter. I heard the splat and knew what had happened without needing to turn around.
This image is very uncomfortable for me to look at, probably because what I see now reminds me of ejaculate, and what I did then was pick it right up and put it in the boiling water anyway. It tasted fine!
EGGS — OUT
I realized I’d never shared any of the eggs I ate outside of my home all summer — but I don’t actually remember getting any until this day, which is a sad realization as someone who enjoys going out to breakfast.
I was on East Broadway in Chinatown, waiting for a charter bus to take me to a Walmart on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. I had walked many miles (or what felt like many miles) that day, and I was very hot and very sweaty — probably the sweatiest I’d ever been in public — and I was carrying a very large duffle bag that was somehow simulteanouly pulling my shirt up and my shorts down, to the point where I was 99% sure everyone could see a decent portion of the wasteband of my underwear, but not in the cool, intentional way that the hot girls are doing these days, more in the way that a little kid sometimes doesn’t get their pants on all the way after going to the bathroom. I really wanted to sit down, eat, and adjust myself somewhere.
I tried to buy a red bean bun at the tiny bakery next to the bus stop, but I didn’t have any cash and my duffle bag was doubling my width, so me being inside the shop wasn’t really working out for anyone. The sidewalk where the bus picked up was already too full of my bus-mates for me to sit down on the curb, and the small patches of sidewalk shade created by the neighboring businesses’ awnings were equally crowded.
Thankfully, I saw people sitting down inside a cafe across the street and wandered in, thinking I could for sure find a seat, a bathroom, and food. I was right!!!!!
It was Kopitiam, a Malaysian place that serves breakfast all day. I got the soft-boiled eggs and toast with this Kaya jam. I had no clue what it was when I ordered it, but it was really good. (I’m linguistically limited when it comes to describing taste — just can never find the words for it — so I’ll leave it at that.) I even looked up how to order a jar of it online. The rest of the menu looks delish, and I hope to go back when circumstances allow for more liberty in my meal selection!
I have never eaten eggs out of a container like this before, but it was fun. I felt like that TikTok chef in Bushwick. I used a spoon to slurp the eggs into my mouth, and I scraped the bottom of the container as you do with a cup of yogurt. I was glad I decided to eat this before getting on the bus, and while facing away from the rest of the restaurant.
EGGS IN LITERATURE
It doesn’t get eggier than that. I read this for the first time in 2022 and totally loved it. It rewired some things for me.
I reread it recently because I was, for like a week in late July/early August, trying to intentionally think about my future and how to go about the Question of Children.
I can go on and on about Mrs. Dalloway forever, but reading this book felt more like a … private experience for me to knock around in my head and journal than a chance to indulge in some literary whatever. I highly recommend it if you spend a lot of time thinking about your body, other people’s bodies, children, sex, men, women, your parents, being alive, dying. So I think that about covers all of us!!!
Thanks for reading! This felt like a totally stupid way to spend my summer but there’s always next year! And more eggs.
TTYL XOXOXOXO
Love this (I, too, bawled to Marcel the Shell in an airplane seat & am very happy August is over)