A Reflection on Another Summer Lived

My pace of reading and also buying books has been a bit slower this summer, a difference from the speed with which I was tearing through literature, almost desperately and manically last summer. I’m working this summer, and only have a year left of school before I join the workforce. I wonder if I am growing up too fast. I wonder if my speed to grow up and gain a sense of independence is healthy. Sometimes I think about the near future with melancholy, a yearning for the past, for the life I once had, filled with free time, that has already been lived, and can no longer be grasped with my hands again. It’s a bit chilling to think that I will never read at that pace again. It can be recreated, on lazy days, it can be relived, through scrolling through my old posts and writing. But I can never go back to those days as they were.

But I face the fact with a strange sense of power. In those few months, I read so many books in the comfort of my bed, and I miss looking up and realizing I had vicariously lived so many lives as a result. But now, I’m living my own life, creating my own plots and scenes that I will one day look back on and “reread.” I’ll think fondly of these current days that will already be lived and therefore written and recorded forever. Moments don’t “disappear” once they’ve been lived. They’ll simply be preserved in the previous chapters of the story of my life, for me to always cherish and keep deep inside me. They'll last forever, unlike my fading memories of the literal experience.

So as I gently move my titles from section to section and ease my new purchases onto my unread bookshelves, not knowing if I will ever read them all, I think to myself that life is meant to be lived.

July 23, 2023