“Stuck in July”
Everyone is posting their August in photographs,
little squares filled with sunsets and bare feet,
lake water glittering beneath afternoon light,
cold drinks sweating against sun-warmed hands.
They are saying goodbye to summer
with camera rolls full of proof that they lived it.
Trips they took, people they loved, places they went,
all the beautiful ways August happened to them.
I keep scrolling through everyone else’s month
and wondering what I would post from mine.
There are no sunsets I remember watching,
nothing that could explain where I’ve been.
Because somehow August came and went
while I stayed somewhere back in July,
trapped inside a moment that refuses to end,
listening to the same words over and over again.
Your mother didn’t make it.
Your mother didn’t make it.
Your mother didn’t make it.
As if repetition might eventually make it understandable.
But it doesn’t.
It only makes July happen again.
It puts me back inside that terrible moment
where the world still had time to take everything from me.
August never really arrived here.
The calendar changed, but I didn’t move with it.
Thirty-one days passed through this house
while I learned how loud silence can actually be.
No one captures themselves breaking apart.
There is nothing worth saving about crying so hard
your chest hurts from trying to breathe,
or realizing this pain is not going anywhere.
There is no pretty version of the nights
when grief crawled into bed beside me,
or the mornings I opened my eyes
and remembered all over again that she was dead.
There are only empty rooms,
the phone calls I can never make again,
the things I still want to tell her,
and the silence that answers me every single time.
My August was tears.
It was pain settling into places I didn’t know could hurt.
It was heartache becoming part of the furniture,
something I walked around because I couldn’t move it.
It was watching the rest of the world have a summer
while mine ended in the middle of July.
It was watching everyone collect memories
while I remained trapped inside the one I would give anything to forget.
So I don’t have an August photo dump.
I don’t have a month I know how to summarize.
I have thirty-one days I barely recognize
and a grief that somehow remembers every second.
Tomorrow everyone will turn the calendar again.
August will become something they did,
something they can leave behind them,
while September quietly takes its place.
But I am still back there.
Still hearing those words.
Still losing my mother in the exact same moment
every time my mind presses play.
And maybe that is all August was for me:
standing somewhere between July and everything after,
with tears where an entire summer should have been,
listening to the unbearable loudness of a life without her.
FRD 2026