Every pore is a boiling cauldron, water spitting and sloshing over the lip to run a race down your skin, leaving tacky trails of salt and misery. Every inhale can threaten to choke you with the excess humidity pressing, pulling, pillowing. The surface tension of water you see executed so well on your kitchen counter, on the floor, that polarity of water is prevalant even in you too, the water inside you beckoning to the water outside. It all roils uncomfortably, hungrily demanding more of your body, more of your mind, more more more.
For five minutes one night, I genuinely thought god was telling me to kill myself. Not as if he’s squeamish about blood and death, after all— but I went to sleep and in the morning I thought, nah, that’s just August. There’s something about August that makes water more important than ever. Maybe it’s the flash flooding, maybe it’s the increased needs of your body for that life liquid in a heat dome, maybe it’s the pretty pattern of caustics at the floor underneath clear water. That’s what those bands dancing bands of lights are at the bottom fo pools and on the sand are called, by the way, caustics. Just learned that, and what a harsh word for a beautiful phenomenon. Also, sun glitter. There’s something about the element of play that takes water to a mystical level, something magic and too good for the mortal realm. I think I’d like for my body to be found wrapped in caustics.
The sun demands your constant vigilance, your devotion, your caution, your pain. Overhead it shines forcefully, a preening peacock that burns you when it notices how you’re too tired to care.
This is a real intense month, it’s the peak of summer heat, more madness and death occurs here than in most other months. But I don’t have a real statistic on that, it’s just one of those things. Tempers are shorter, moods are more erratic— I’ve never felt so full of resentment before. Though, that’s not just August, but living in a country that actively enjoys hurting others with a type of productive glee that makes me want to hurt. It makes me want to open up a second credit card because I’m actually fucking sick of feeling bad about not being hireable or marketable. After a certain number of rejections, your stomach unknots itself and you suddenly think, wait there is no way it’s all me, and if that’s the case then why should I feel as if I’m obligated to suffer and live piteously until the machine decides I’ve had enough poverty, when I can do as my country does and kick debt down the road. I have a dog to feed and avarice to indulge!
The month of August houses the celebration of Vertumnus, God of the Turning Year— or, generally, of change. In seasons, tides, rivers, in self as he himself was a shapeshifter. It is for him you would lay on an altar the first fruits of the season.
One day filled with delicious arrogance, the next steady and slow and calm, another filled with a cacophany of contrasting energies. Hopeful, in denial, angry, resentful, obedient, lost. I cried a few tears in my car. I let the steady waves of an orgasm wash over me and stretched my arms overhead, listening to ASMR after. I’m hoping against hope. I think if someone presses too hard on my skin it’ll collapse in, rotted flesh like a three month-old apple, and the rest of me will follow like dominoes. The thought isn’t as repulsive as I’d like. I wouldn’t have this problem if I could sell thigh pics, I’m at least confident my thighs could make bank. But would you fucking believe it, there’s no website for that? FEET are apparently big enough to garner their own individual websites, but not thighs?! No vision!
Before Augustus Caeser, there was no August. There was only Sextilis, the six month, in the Roman calender. But July had already been renamed for Julius Caeser, and wasn’t he, Augusts, even more important? So naturally he should have a month named after him. This unshakeable confidence and greed is why we have August.
I watched Halloween Kills, and it’s a little twisted how I get relief from watching a very large man brutally murder people. But who could argue that watching a master at his craft is anything but a gift? It’s more than that though, it’s seeing the firefighters squaring up without hesitation, it’s the townsfolk’s frenized but ultimately useless baying for blood, its Tommy and his misplaced confidence, it’s Laurie and the predator’s instinct she shares with her brother. But most importantly? It’s Michael and his unwavering commitment to living as he is, because he’s never had a thought otherwise. Despite the small gleans of a showman, a crafty mind we get from his placement of victim’s bodies, his vinyl choice, he doesn’t have the capability to doubt himself or his skills. He never questions himself, he is a killer and he is the boogeyman and he is the town’s greatest fear.
Should I lament? Should I ask why I seem to be continuously looked over, never given in return even a portion of what I give to others? Should I forsake everything, risk my four walls and my bathroom and my tenuous grip on creature comforts to crash out and tell the honest truth? Why am I not seen, why am I not considered? Why do I feel like I’m being punished and I’ll never be told my crime?
A part of me thinks that, people who asks questions like these, they don’t get shit named after them. Especially not months.
August is blood and dry earth and the sun glitter in that little river in the botanical garden. It’s magic and pain, agony and ecastic release, dry sear and wet press. It’s so much because it wants to be it all. The last month of summer, the prelude to fall, the historical monument and the capitalist’s slobbering frenzy for more money, and its the storm and the drought and the sun and the moon. It’s everything and it’s bad at it and it’s too human.
August makes you give everything you can and then pushes you beyond that, and at the same time makes you take more than you can bear. So you collapse too early in the game, unable to do anything more but certain August will force more from you than you can bear, as it does every year, and August is just still standing there staring at you with a lewdly gaping mouth and greed dripping down its chin.
But . . . the thing is. I’m greedy too.