I used to think of August as a new beginning. I remember it as a marker that half the year has passed. I remember it as the last full month before September starts asking what you have actually done with your summer.

There is a version of me from that summer with salt-cracked skin and sand still living in the seams of everything I owned.

There was a door that never quite shut right and I used to leave it open on purpose until rust settled into the hinges, as if expecting to welcome someone back.

And there was a name. Seven letters that sat heavy on the tip of my tongue, impossible to utter without the whole suffocating heat of those months rushing back behind it like a weather system of its own, sudden and severe.

I knew we were never going to last past the season. A part of me knew that even in July, even when I was pretending otherwise.

Still, I stayed.

With afternoons stretched longer. Evenings became excuses to stay awake. Time, which had always been so strict with me, suddenly learned to linger for you.

Days turned to weeks turned to months.

Even when my January calendar was a fortress of deadlines and cascading obligations.

Even when every late-night conversation made tomorrow feel inevitable in February.

Even when I found impossible hours in impossibly busy days in March just because your voice had become somewhere I wanted to end up in.

You knew it better than anyone. Despite a schedule that left me breathless, I never had time for anyone else in this world, yet I was carving out sanctuaries in the dead of night just to make time for you.

Until April came and there were signs I tried not to notice.

The kind you only recognize once they have become memories.

The way your kindness belonged to everyone.

They occupied the same ease, the same closeness, the same effortless familiarity I believed was ours. I told myself not to be jealous. I told myself kindness was not a crime.

I tried to tell you in May. Yet every reassurance landed deaf to my ears until I could no longer tell where friendship ended and where I was supposed to begin.

I sat through all of it in June. Not once, but enough times for my honesty to become predictable. Nothing changed except the number of times I learned how to swallow the same sentence.

Maybe that is what Taylor meant when she wrote, “Back when we were still changing for the better. Wanting was enough.”

There was a version of us from that summer that believed desire alone could outgrow every misunderstanding. We were too young to realize that wanting cannot build the fences love refuses to keep standing.

Still, hope is a rather stubborn thing.

“To live for the hope of it all.” I know I did.

I carried it like a second heartbeat, I cancelled plans just in case you’d call, convincing myself that every ringing phone could redeem another quiet disappointment.

I had hoped that September would come carrying the promise that we would celebrate another year older side by side.

I put my hope in the flowers I lied to myself would still be blooming come October.

I folded what little faith I had left into November’s first piercing winds, believing if we could survive the cold, December would finally become proof that we had survived us.

However, August arrived long before.

Not as the beginning I once believed it to be, but as the unravelling of everything I had spent months stitching together.

It came smelling of salt on sunburnt skin, with rusty doors left open behind us, and a bottle of wine uncorked too early empty on the table.

I drank each of your promises as though forever had already agreed to us. And by the time I realized the bottle had run dry, I was still holding it like it could somehow refill itself.

So much for calling it summer love. So much for the easy shorthand of us, like it was ours to claim.

These seasons exist long enough to convince you they are permanent before returning themselves to time, asking you to call it growth instead of heartbreak.

Maybe that is why August slipped away, like you did.

You were never mine to lose because you were never mine to keep.

You were a season. You were August.

I was the one who stayed out too long in it, salt-skinned, sunburned, and drunk on a bottle I mistook for forever.

The Frontman