Summer of Change

Issue 6: A formal farewell to the passing season

I rewatched one of my favorite films twice this summer. The first time was at Écoles Cinema Club in Paris with Allison, CEO of Boy Movies, to celebrate her birthday; the second, at my neighborhood cinema, BAM, with Alice. At BAM, Call Me By Your Name was screened as part of their “Summers of Change” series, a name so evocative I had to steal it for myself. BAM’s official programming for the series reads:

When summer temps reach what feels like near boiling point, so too do the tensions and naked moments that often prove to be so pivotal in our lives. This sun-drenched series finds characters trying their best to surf massive waves of summertime change.

It got me thinking about my summer that just passed, The Summer I Spent Three Years In New York. The films curated in the series (Call Me By Your Name, Aftersun, Do the Right Thing, Summer with Monika) all focus on a singular summer as the lightning rod of change. This is not only narratively compelling, but also reminiscent of a particular time in one’s life: youth, adolescence, an age where you spend large swaths of time waiting for life to happen. I yearn for the simplicity of those days! Now, it feels like the exact opposite — there’s simply too much life coming at me, not from me.

As I reflected on this past summer, I came to believe that while the big moments of change make for good films and storytelling, real life rarely happens this way. Instead, in my experience, you go through smaller moments of internal shifts that you don’t notice at first. You don’t notice for a while, actually. That change within yourself remains blurry, out of focus, until it’s suddenly illuminated, sharpening at a specific place of memory, or during a time marker of significance.

I think there’s something so special when you find yourself in a moment, and you can recognize it’s a moment. For me, it was an end of summer ferry ride to the Rockaways, where I rediscovered a glimmer of my past self, and then all of a sudden, it’s like the years of erosion through wind, water, ice, are all thrown into sharp relief and you realize: you’ve been reshaped. It happens slowly, like many things in life, then all at once. “Our true projects have always been ourselves.”

It reminds of Remains of the Day, when the narrator is reflecting on his life, noting you can only discern the nature of a turning point in retrospect. That definitionally, you have to be looking backwards in order to understand the gravity of a singular moment, one seemingly small decision, a slight misunderstanding.

“But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of ‘turning points’, one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one’s relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There surely was nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day

I suppose I largely agree with that. But I wish this wasn’t the case. That’s why I think those moments of noticing change, marking the passage of time, and recognizing transformations in our daily lives are so precious. Why can’t we pay attention to what will become the turning points of our lives, of meaning making, of the ever-so-slight gap between connection and missed opportunity, between love and longing, between dreams realized or, as Ishiguro puts it so hauntingly, “dreams forever irredeemable”?

After all, am I also not only able to extract or ascribe meaning across my ferry rides in retrospect? I’m reminded of some writing advice I read once about the value in writing about events from which you have some narrative or temporal distance:

Avoid using recent experiences because you could lack a clear understanding of them. Ken Macrorie advises, “If you are under twenty, you need to write of childhood. A writer requires some distance between him and the events he recalls—not always, but usually. Then he is unfamiliar enough with them to feel the need to relate them fully for his reader and for himself. If he writes of yesterday’s or last year’s events, he usually remembers them so well he leaves them shrouded in his nearby intimate memory, which the reader does not share.”

— William H. Phillips, Writing Short Stories

I do see how that instruction could be helpful, particularly for narrative storytelling. But I said fuck that advice, and wrote this essay not even in “intimate memory,” but in living memory, quite literally as I rode the ferry to the Rockaways in August a few months ago. Included below, with minimal editing, except for the parts where I couldn’t decipher my own handwriting……

Ferry to the Rockaways

8.17.25

Feeling the sun rays on my face and the wind in my hair, watching the sparkle of the water, I’m really struck with an overwhelming feeling of contentedness. Like I’d be happy to have these tactile sensations envelop me for a good long while, longer than the duration of this ferry ride. Maybe this is peace, but despite the symphony of chatter, barely drowned out by Bieber’s crooning vocals on SWAG, punctuated with the thrum of the ferry engine, I feel quiet. I feel very content with where I am, with who I am, with whoever I am yet to become.

This is my third ferry ride to the Rockaways, in my third year of living in NYC. These discrete moments, particular markers of time and growth—it’s not just nostalgia but a deeper groove. Something about having one fixed moment or memory, whether a specific city, a particularly haunting smell, or a retracing of your own steps that offers an opportunity for contemplation. The steps, routines, smells, sights that a previous, different version of you experienced. Maybe I am just being too drama, doing too much to ascribe meaning as the insufferable tryhard ~ writeur ~ that I am, but this one particular ferry ride holds a lot for me. It’s just so metaphorical! I didn’t even realize it until I sat down on the roof deck, opened my notebook, and started writing.

• 2023: Trying and putting in effort but it still feels off, is that because of the way I am or depression
• 2024: Okay so I think it was depression, because wow, I actually have friends and is this what belonging feels like???
• 2025: SOLO, BABY!!

My first year in NYC, I took this ride with a friend from college that I reconnected with once I moved to the city. Though the friendship chemistry didn’t really spark in a lasting way for one reason or another, I still feel very grateful for the trying that we both did. There really is so much beauty in the attempt, and that’s exactly where I was emotionally in my NYC journey at the time. I was trying. But it felt like things (broadly) weren’t taking. Nothing was clicking, despite the attempts, nothing felt like it fit. I was trying to make friends, trying to do things, trying to not be depressed. Because that’s how it works, right? You just have to say “I’m not going to be depressed” and it goes away through sheer will! That beach trip, I remember discussing shared insecurities around weight and body image, just two anxious girlies going to the beach together, being so brave to bare it all in bikinis. (As my sister once wisely told me, “If you wear a bikini, you have a bikini body.” She’s so smart, it’s annoying.) But the ferry ride at its core was both of us making bids for emotional vulnerability, each of us trying to suss out the vibe for a potential long-term, lasting, deep friendship. We had a nice time on the beach, reading, yapping, and it culminated in us each taking a dip in the Atlantic.

My second ferry ride to the Rockaways was in 2024 with THE GIRLIES!! Addy, Alice, Cissy, Elaine, Jess. A year passed, and not only did I have friends (big if true), I was lucky enough to actually possess the coveted friend permutation: a friend group. The vibe and energy for year two’s ferry ride was full of laughs, mirth, and fun—in a way that felt easy. Natural. It was built on earned friendship intimacy over the last year, the investment in quality individual time to help bridge group dynamics, which pays off later (sometimes!) Whether that was Addy and Jess huddled together on their towels watching Pommel Horse Guy, or all of us gobbling down Jess’s now famous beach sandwiches, there was no trying. We just were together, and that was enough to have a great time. We made memories, jokes, and shared a beautiful end of summer together. I had just come back from Greece and the stunning aquamarine of the Aegean Sea, but I still took my obligatory dip into the cool grey waters of the Atlantic, washing away another summer.

This year, now in 2025, I took the ferry alone. I’m meeting a subset of the girl group from last year (shoutout continuity), but we’re all making separate journeys and meeting at the beach. I think it says something huge about where I’m at now—at peace with myself—that not only did I make this trip alone, but more than that, I really wanted to. I was really looking forward to my solo time on the ferry and the independence of transit on my own, to be able to walk fully at my own pace, to be alone with my thoughts on the water with the sun on my face and wind in my hair, to feel the possibility to do whatever I wanted, the freedom to slip into my own mind, my own desires, my own daydreams. The metaphorical balance between my internal and external, solo versus social sides felt emphatically punctuated by the logistics of getting to the beach this year. And I feel really proud of myself (a very rare emotional experience for ME) for the work I’ve done to get here. To this moment, this place of contentedness, of acceptance, to this place of stability. Is this what they call growth? Maturing?

As Cissy summarized pithily, we love when the place doesn’t change, but the person does. It’s the opposite of my mentality when I moved to New York, which was myopically focused on changing my physical place, but the person I was at the time wasn’t changing, no matter how hard I wanted or willed it to be so. Because everywhere you go, there you are.

In the freshness of my breakup, when I was desperately seeking any salve to momentarily provide relief from the raw pain of heartbreak, I remember turning to Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar advice column. I truly cannot find the exact quote anymore, but it was something about healing from a breakup and navigating the unique grief that comes with a non-death loss. It went something like this (my bad paraphrasing):

You do these small things every day that don’t seem like they’re going to make a difference. You get up, you go for a walk in the park, you see friends, but it doesn’t feel any better. So what do you do? You keep doing the same thing. You get up, you go to the park, you walk, you move your body. Even when it doesn’t feel like it’s helping. And then all of a sudden, one day, you’re sitting on a bench in the park where you’ve been walking. You take a breath, you look up at the sky through the bristling leaves of the trees, and you realize: you are okay.

You’re in the same place, the same park you’ve been walking in everyday, the same park that hasn’t felt good for a very long time, or it’s your end of summer ferry ride, and you realize you’re no longer the same person. But there you are.

Ferry on ⛴️,

katie, Girl Who's Going to be Okay