The Summer Without You ((full)) May 2026

English 101: Creative Nonfiction Date: April 14, 2026

I did not cry when I packed the boxes. I had run out of tears sometime in the second week of August, during a thunderstorm that knocked out the power and left me sitting in the dark, listening to the rain hammer the roof, thinking: This is the sound of the world washing itself clean, and I am still here.

That, I think, was the lesson the summer was trying to teach me: the universe is not cruel. It is simply busy. It has no time for our individual apocalypses. the summer without you

The most disorienting discovery of that summer was that my body continued to function. My heart pumped. My lungs filled. My fingers typed emails and turned doorknobs. This felt like a betrayal. How could cells divide and nails grow in a world where you did not exist?

Mowing the lawn became an act of archaeology. I found the divot in the grass where you used to rest your foot while tying your shoes. Watering your tomato plants felt like a heresy—I was keeping something alive that you had started. And yet, to let them wilt would be to admit you were never coming back to eat them, salted and raw, juice running down your chin. English 101: Creative Nonfiction Date: April 14, 2026

On the last day of summer, I ate one of your tomatoes. It was mealy and too ripe. But I salted it anyway. I ate it standing at the kitchen counter, looking out the window at the empty porch swing, and I did not feel better. I did not feel healed.

But the cat was hungry. And feeding it required me to get out of bed before noon. It required me to open the back door, to step into the punishing August light, to pour kibble into a chipped bowl that had once held your chili. The cat did not care about my grief. It only cared about the food. And somehow, that transaction—pure, biological, unpoetic—was the first thing that made sense all summer. It is simply busy

Without you, time broke its contract. As a child, I believed summer was infinite—a lazy river of July afternoons that curved forever. With you gone, summer became a cruel mathematician. It introduced me to the arithmetic of loss: One empty mug in the morning sink. Two unplayed chess pieces on the back patio. Three voicemails I saved on my phone, knowing I would never delete them, knowing I would never listen to them again because the sound of your laugh was now a weapon.