When summer arrives this sense of freedom comes with it. This freedom I've experienced for so long is changing right in front of my eyes, this is the first summer after my freshman year, and this will be my only first summer after freshman year, how wild a thing to only have once, of course, there will be other summers, other holidays, and other months. But it is the solidness of this one that frightens me the most, how will I spend it? Will I mess it up? Will this freedom fade?
In its own way, it's quite odd how much I worry, in another, I think of the one day that I don't. The 15th. Now you're probably asking yourself what's so special about the 15th, how could some random day in the middle of the month be special? Glad you asked.
Once a month I celebrate my national holiday*
*An unofficial national holiday to be more specific.
About a year ago, I was in this rut. It was finals season, senioritis was suffocating, and the thought of having to endure winter in Texas for the seventeenth time in a row was sickening. Between review packets and extensive online scrolling, I had stumbled on a TikTok creator, who talked about the things she did to “romanticize” her life. I think now the video is gone, and maybe even the creator, but something about that video stuck with me.
In the video, she talked about all the ways one could romanticize their life, one thing she listed was every month deciding to celebrate something, and deeming it a national holiday.
At the time I couldn’t think of anything better than pushing a start-over button, so I did. I went out and bought myself flowers, and pretended that the fifteenth was the first.
I spent my day in June in a field near the city, with flowers, a picnic blanket, generous amounts of sunscreen, bug repellent, and wild imagination. Starting over this month looked like being kinder to myself, allowing for less fear about growing up, and more room for being in the now, existing with no limits or expectations. Everything that could go wrong on a picnic did, there were ants stealing lunch, heating melting away at my skin, bees testing a level of stillness I am deeply unequipped with, and still, it was summer, I was here, and it was the 15th, this was national flowers and fresh starts day.
I used to have this idea that flowers are not something you buy for yourself.
I think it’s because I never really got flowers except maybe once or twice, so somewhere along the way I developed this idea that I wasn’t somebody that deserved them, that I had to wait for somebody to buy them for me, to finally say “Here. You are a girl that deserves flowers.'' Whether it was working for an ambitiously draining award, or for the love and affection of a boy who definitely wasn't the flower-buying type, I was in a relentless wait.
It created this sort of longing. In farmer's markets and grocery stores, I’d be picking up milk or something and suddenly find myself distracted and admiring what I couldn’t have, wishing for the day I had peonies in my kitchen and tulips in my room.
It became this sort of resentment, I guess that’s why I added it in the holiday, I wanted to stop resenting and start enjoying. I went to Trader Joes and had my pick at their big wall of various colorful flowers and decided on a bouquet of baby’s-breath and pink peonies, I went to check out and to my disbelief was not bombarded but the “worthiness” police and told I was a disgrace that wasn't allowed to buy flowers for myself, trust me I was shocked.
I went home and made them a place in my room, and realized this feeling, of love, hope, and a new start, was something that just had to stay. And so it did.
I decided flowers weren't enough after basically bombing my first final of the year. I remember how I couldn't sleep, I was doom scrolling and reaching for some sort of understanding as to why everything felt so out of balance. I just kept thinking of all the bad things that could spiral out of this one bad thing. I had made it from a low moment to a low life and found myself with all these many possibilities of why this month was now tainted irreversibly bad, and all I could do was try again next month.
I don't know if you know or not, but we die. There are quite literally only so many months, and here I was deciding this was a throwaway one because of a bad chapter. That is when it dawned on me, what if I just reset? I could pretend those first fifteen days were just a test run, and these next fifteen were whatever I wanted them to be.
To a licensed psychologist that probably sounds ridiculous but I promise it works.
It’s silly, my friend Rachel, called it “the oddest thing you've ever done” and about three months later, she and the guy she wasn't dating but dating stopped not not “dating”, and we spent a week, crying, reminiscing, ruminating on heartbreak and grief, and suddenly the 15th rolled around and I knew exactly what I had to do. I needed to do, the oddest thing I've ever done, so I went and got hydrangeas in her favorite color, brought my box set of ‘Cheers’, a fresh notebook, and a pint of love potion #31 from Baskin Robbins.
We spent the day watching old sitcoms and writing eulogies for the past, at sunset we made a casket out of an old crayon box to bury what had been, we laid to rest our grief with chocolate-stained hands and laugh tracks in the back of our minds, {and we let the day reset what a crappy month it had been.}
Heartbreak isn't something that can be healed in a single afternoon but, the 15th was a start. A new start, a fresh start, even if it wasn't the first. It’s no less silly or odd, it just can be exactly that, cause sometimes that's what's needed.
NATIONAL FLOWERS AND FRESH STARTS DAY
“National Holiday” is probably too strong a title to give something I made up on my bedroom floor at two in the morning, but I would be lying if I said it wasn't my favorite part of the month. Sometimes shit sucks beyond repair, and sometimes we just need a chance to try again. Take a chance, buy yourself flowers, and start again.
