How Many Summers Does a Little Dog Have?

August is the time when I get most depressed, so I'm trying to get a jump on that. Mary Oliver.

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*****

After I quit drugs ten summers ago, I was convinced all the days had suddenly become 60 hours long. I was newly abstinent, flaky about meetings, figuring out where all my limbs were, and I was at a loss for how to exist in the world. For example, what did people do between 5:30 p.m. and bedtime? And what was this thing called "bedtime" anyway? It was a difficult adjustment—those early days of Trazodone and tea medleys were not exactly pink-clouded.

Making it even more uncomfortable was that it forced me to confront how many thousands of hours I'd pissed away so haphazardly, with very little to show for it. I knew I had traveled places—there were stamps on my passport, but those trips were always rushed, burdened by personal melodrama, tinged with a regrettable darkness. And the same goes for restaurants. I know I've eaten at some fancy-ish places run by famous chefs in large cities, but I sadly can't name many of them. If anyone asked me my favorite restaurant right now, or my most spectacular meal, I'd have to spend a few days trying to come up with an accurate list.

This next gap—this one bugs me the most—because I know I had sat across from people, sometimes for several hours through the night and into the next morning, and was taken in by them, their wisdom, or their sense of humor. And maybe they felt the same about me—friends for life! Then we'd stumble out into the next day, convinced that the rest of our hours and days on earth would be enriched from here on out due to our shared interests. But all of those friends disappeared instantly, a bunch of vampires dying in the sunlight.

I was pretty sure that my sober life would be long and lonely, devoid of adventure. Time was a curse.

****

August is traditionally a tough month for me—it's when my biggest bout of seasonal depression tends to creep in. I wrote about this before, a couple of Augusts ago, and summed it up this way:

Summertime passes, and I'm full of regret and maddening wistfulness for…something. A different, longer summer, maybe, but mostly, I want a fully-formed version of me. I'm running out of versions of myself I'm pretending to be.

Last year also hit me pretty hard.

I'm sure it mostly has to do with the coming school year—I get that "maddening wistfulness" for the first-day-of-school energy of my youth. Now, I also get worked up that my kids are growing in ways that I'm no longer noticing enough, mostly because I don't want to notice.

Four years ago, my two oldest ones were out in front of our house holding up a sign announcing that it was their first day of pre-school. The second after I took it, my stomach sank because I knew that time was about to accelerate and there was nothing I could do about it. Oh, I tried. That picture hung on our fridge for the first part of the year. But I pulled it down, assuming that if I couldn't look at it anymore, I would be less aware of how different they were each day when they got home from school. It's not working—they keep getting taller.

Wednesday's edition of George Bilgere's newsletter featured a poem from Marie Howe, called "Hurry." I read this soon after it dropped at midnight, then spent the rest of the night pacing around, walking into my kids' bedrooms and kissing their heads, rubbing my hands through their hair.

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store

and the gas station and the green market and

Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,

as she runs along two or three steps behind me

her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?

To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?

Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,

Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—

you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking

back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,

hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

Since I knew August was coming in hot this week, I tried to get ahead of it and formulate a plan, or else I'll be a wreck.