Summer’s Last Encore
by Emily Kirkwood
Every ending is just a memory practising the art of receding, as summer hesitates to take the final bow. The heat clings, unrepentant and tenacious, despite remapping our mood boards, its brilliance refuses to subside, too bright and too boisterous. Summer beckons us with that unrelenting insistence to marinate in sunlight, to haunt every gathering with its compulsion, to bear being. Perhaps summer isn’t a season at all but a sovereign dressed in gold: it asks for too much, gives too little, yet we thank it anyway. We endure its luminosity and relentlessness, both captivated and drained, as if drawn to a performance we know is destined to wane. Days stretch unnaturally, and social batteries abate under the merciless warmth. And yet, how do we resist its insistence?
Summer feels optional, yet its presence infiltrates everything, reshaping routines, desires, and wish lists. Its monarch’s radiance is corrupting time itself, stealing hours of sleep and bending the cadence of our days so as to fit its own inexorable design. Every weekend is a plan, every hour a debt we’re expected to pay in sunlight as if the season itself polices our choices. Choosing indoors feels like defiance; to admit exhaustion feels ungrateful, almost blasphemous. Summer insists on being idolised, despite most of us wilting beneath its gaze, yearning for shade and still. Its myth of sovereignty is yet another obligation, a performance of happiness leaving us more hollow than satisfied.
Autumn slips into the crevices summer’s claws failed to conquer, reclaiming what the incineration left untamed. It carries no such demands, no shame on our retreats, and no censure for favouring quiet over grandeur. Leaves settle lightly, and the air exhales, encouraging stillness without guilt. Autumn weaves through amber light, nestling into still alcoves, where the hum of a coffee shop carries the scent of pumpkin spice and books whose spines carry their years like quiet wisdom, and the faint imprint of ourselves gently folded into each page. The nights get darker in a way that asks nothing of us, and we inhabit the pause that slips unnoticed between one moment and the next.
Every reign must relinquish its crown, and autumn steps in, not to dominate like summer but to trace the soft resonance of summer’s fervent encore. Its presence reminds us that intensity is transient, and even the most sonorous forces must yield to the quiet and mundane. Amid this season, we catch the ebb and flow of being, as one presence recedes and another feebly unfolds, inevitable yet tender.
We cling to summer as we cling to what is familiar, resisting the inevitable decline of its light, the surrender of heat to shadow. Yet in this resistance, we find debilitation; our body ache from the bidding of brightness, and our minds tire under the cruel demand to be eternally invigorated. Autumn arrives not with fanfare but quiet inevitability, reminding us that surrender is not frailty but a form of sagacity. Falling leaves reflect our capacity to release what no longer serves us, to inhabit the spaces between urgency and rest. Slowly, we learn that the lapse of intensity is natural, that relinquishing control can be a sort of freedom. Witnessing the cadence of life, each moment born and fading. The human heart, as the season does, must yield to transition; only in yielding can we discover presence, gratitude and the delicate comforts eclipsed by summer’s tyranny of radiance. Summer isn’t a season; it’s a performance, and we are complicit in glorifying discomfort as if it were gratification.
Summer is for the body; autumn is for the soul.