Reasons Not To Kill Yourself Today, No. 18: Summer Is Over

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There’s a me that you can have and a me that you can’t have. The me that you can have will tell you things are bad and good, but mostly good, and work is constant, but you know, good, and I’m sorry I didn’t come to that party, and summer was too short, it’s sad. But the other me knows that summer is the longest season, and now that it’s cooled and gone, well thank god, really.

I was born in fall and so fall is my natural state. But that’s not it. Once when I was googling S.A.D. (oh, like you’ve never) I found that lots of serious depressives get worse in the summer, that suicides happen more on sunny days, and the knowledge fell on me like one of those late-day shafts of golden and biblical light in which you can see all the way to the world’s end. Because of course it’s worse in the summer. Of course that’s when the difference between how you’re supposed to feel (wheeeeeeeee-slash-infinite) and how you really feel (is there such a thing as whiskey delivery?) is at its most impossible. And of course this makes you do wet, manic, infantile things you will only have time to regret in February.

Well now it’s October and it’s fourteen degrees outside and partly cloudy. I can wear all the clothes I like, but no bra. A leather jacket, but no tights. A sweater. Sunglasses. This is as comfortable as it gets.

And I feel like working again.

And I’m older.

And now after the bleak hot months everyone’s putting away their surfedelic garage-pot bullsha-na-na records and listening to proper guitar music with no good feelings again, like Kurt Vile and Girls and the Stone Roses, and it’s too cold at night to go to parties in other neighborhoods, parties we don’t want to go to anyway, so PERFECT, and I’m reading whole books for dinner, and although I’m not any happier, I’m also not worrying. World’s on my side again.

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image – Martin Pettitt