How to Get Lost in the Promise of August:
The world revolves around August for me.
I used to joke that my birthday lasted from the Nordstrom half-yearly sale to whenever the September issue of Vogue dropped; a beautiful window of liminal time outside of school and free of obligations. It was a time of gifts, a time of rest, and a time of celebration. August promised me each of these things as a child and I have held onto them as I’ve grown up.
My birthday, by the way, is August 8th: an infinity sign, a parallel, a track, a loop. 8. A birthday is a loop around the sun, a chance to change your life as you age. As I got older, August continued to be the best month of the year and remains a time when I feel brave enough to throw myself from heights that used to dizzy me. It’s the start of a new year, of course, for me personally but with this song, it’s for everyone, now.
Today, the sales and the September issue seem less important, and the promise of August expanded into bigger galaxies than I’d let myself dream of: new worlds, new relationships, and new loves. So when I fell in love for the second time, I felt the loop of romance pull tight around me. I had met someone so incredible and so wonderful I promised myself quietly that we were going to spend the rest of our days together. Let’s call him Tyler. The earnestness I had experienced in puppy love with Tyler was now dogged by the realities of adult life: different upbringings, different opinions, different boroughs. And then, too, we met and fell in love under the umbrella of an epidemic, where certain compromises were forced all around us. I was no stranger to compromise and felt a certain beauty in the co-creation of a relationship where we each lay things down for the greater good. You walked this tightrope together, you had to give up something to gain something, an interesting trade-off in any capacity: sort of like giving someone you met on the internet a key to your house, just hoping to get one back.
We sparked like starlight and I believed in the promises we made each other when we first met: I believed that the kisses we shared were keys to each other, unlocking parts of ourselves we would only reveal to one another in small and sacred spaces. I thought of Harry Houdini, a childhood hero of mine, whose wife would kiss literal keys into his mouth as part of his mechanism to delight his waiting audience with a clever escape when wrapped in chains. In the second year of our relationship, I gave Tyler a key to my house and made it clear I expected one back. He never did. He ended up returning his copy of my key on my birthday, a tremendous blow. I still can’t stomach it this to this day, the symbolism too much for the heart of a poet. So I rewrote the protagonist of the song to be someone who did receive a key. It is less honest but also less sad.
As we journeyed on, the bargains were more and more lopsided, and love itself began to feel less fair for us both. We were fighting more and more often, unable to see the stars for the light around us, losing sight of us. We had a funny cycle where my ex would pathologize my behaviors and I would poeticize theirs. Clinical language, masks, and diagnoses were everywhere; the world divided into polarized oppositions and I felt maligned by labels at every step. He would diagnose various conditions for certain actions I considered completely normal (cleaning your makeup) and I would look at actions caused by his neurodivergence and assign them poetry (making Squinkles). We wanted to be right, we each had to be, to see how the world worked around us. The labels helped Tyler more than me: they were a viewfinder for his world. But for me, they were filters obscuring reality and became meaningless, criss-crossing each other and occluding what I was trying to see clearly.
At the very end, when we yelled at each other, we used that very clinical, dejected language like spears to hurl at each other. Toxic. Abusive. Gaslighter. Male manipulator, able-bodied, white-privileged, obtuse, rubber goose, green moose, guava juice, birthday cake, large fries, chocolate shake! It was absurd, and I had to laugh. The truth was that we were two people, of billions on earth, living at and often below the poverty line in the most expensive city in the world, while we watched the decline of the only empire we’d ever known happen during a debilitating, time-stopping global epidemic that we both suffered through. We cared deeply and took our time to be gentle, healing, and soft with each other.
I didn’t realize it actually until the release party, but this song is a rejection of that pathologization of behavior. A mistake is not a personality trait, and victimhood is a crown of thorns. I felt insane, and I was thinking about these things and the world around us in discordant thrums. It felt just as “real” to say we were lost in the promise of August as it was to say that we were two abusers hurting each other. I felt more like we were two moons cleft from our shared orbit by gravity itself. We weren’t really abusers, although we indulged bad behaviors. We were two people who were in love and then weren’t. We were best friends who knew everything about each other until one day we didn’t. We were stars that burned out and galaxies that drifted away from each other.
This song is a reminder that the DSM-5 is just as real as poetry is, neither one really needing be more correct than the other. You organize your world through your choices and through your love. We are made of memories, stardust, and the stories we tell ourselves. We are changed irrevocably by every skyline we live under, every key we hold, and every kiss we share. This I know to be true.
In recent interviews, Pamela Anderson has said of her past choices: I am not a victim. I put myself in crazy situations and I survived them. I couldn’t have said it better myself, but I did sing it better. That is the promise of August—a promise that is yours to make, to keep, to break, or to leave. Now go and get lost!
