Summer Nights
On winter nights, beginnings and endings, and happiness.
I just opened my window. Only three inches, just enough for the raging wind to deliver to my room some surprisingly fresh air. It’s a nice contrast against the recycled one from my crappy floor heater.
There’s a scent in the air. Or maybe I’ve simply been so conditioned to hot and dusty oxygen that it felt so. It’s nice, nonetheless. It reminds me of summer nights.
I hate winter nights.
Everything is pitiful. The days are cloudy and the evenings are cold. This winter might’ve been the worst. It rained on New Year’s eve and the first of the year; perhaps great for California’s thirsty land, but not for Aarush. I just finished the last of my college applications, I really hated it. It felt like forced introspection, and I despise being forced to do anything. With it, the Common App brought plenty of anxiety too. I’m not the greatest student, my transcript is evident, and it’s always been a source of pain for me, especially during finals week and AP testing. Applying to reach schools made me feel like a jester, hoping they’d be distracted by my activity list or find enough appreciation in my calculated essays to ignore my GPA. Fall and winter graciously brought me a situationship as well. We should purge all avoidant-attachment hot-cold girls. Or maybe just have Neuralink tear out whatever trauma made them that way. They are a terrible duo to the unforgiving weather. I’ve also gotten sick, as ritual dictates, and spent plenty days wishing for night, where I could finally think without being bombarded with stimulation.
I’ve taken liking to a new life philosophy, that everything has a way of working out. I’ve made as many mistakes as the next person, probably more. There’s so many things to regret. But I find solace in the idea that I wouldn’t be who I am today without the things I’ve fucked up. I’ve lost opportunities, moments, friends, and crushes. But each time, new doors have opened. This idea’s been repeated a lot, especially on TikTok or Instagram Reels, but it’s true: “new beginnings come from endings.”
The first time I really found an ending was in third grade. We had this test all the kids took near the end of the year, called GATE. The Gifted and Talented Education examination covered everything from basic arithmetic and spatial reasoning to reading comprehension and grammar. It was mandated by the state to pick out the smartest eight and nine-year-olds and give them more after-school learning to satisfy their supposed quench for knowledge. To my mom, that was heaven on earth. I couldn’t care less. I was too enthralled in Minecraft YouTube to give it the time of day. Months leading up to the test date, I heard of friends taking classes to prepare. My mom managed to snag practice booklets and printed them out for me to do, and I hated every moment of it, refusing to even look at the pages. The first month of summer, when the results came out, I found out I’d missed the cutoff by a couple points. It really sucked, especially in combination with friends talking about getting in and being wracked with guilt from spiels by my mom for not studying.
It was the first time I’d felt truly incompetent. In retrospect, I don’t think that feeling has ever left me. It’s left this over-bearing idea in my mind that I’m not good enough, that perhaps I never will be. I started fourth grade on top of my shit. I think it was around then I gained consciousness. I don’t remember much before that year, even memories of that year are pretty hazy. I recall studying hard for once, being inspired by my peer’s work ethic, and setting goals for myself and wholeheartedly pursuing them. I picked up programming manuals and slowly began learning how to code. I started going upstairs to the young adult section in the library and reading the same books all the older kids read.
It led to my first beginning. I was introduced how bitter failing tasted, and taught myself to hate it, especially failing compared to those around me. To this day, every time I hear the test mentioned, I feel as though punched in the gut. I’ve also unconsciously developed this deep hatred for Minecraft, blaming it for the distraction it caused; I haven’t played the game since. It also made me hate school, or at least grades. I love learning and I’m proud to say that nothing has taken that away from me. But to me the idea of a cutoff, of numerical valuations of proficiency, or a line drawn between good and bad students, will always be met by disdain. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always disliked math, rigorous and absolute in every sense, and why I love reading and writing, inherently open to perspective and judgement. It’s ironic, in that sense, that I’ve taken a liking to computer science and machine learning.
It happened nearly a decade ago, but looking back, failing that test might’ve been one of the best things to happen to me. I attribute a significant component of my ambition to that test; it made up a lot of who I am today. Maybe it was a sense of playing catch up, or self-teaching myself what I would gather they would learn in those after-school sessions, or just an overall heightened sense of doing better.
Recently, I’ve thought a lot about an argument I’ve heard for why we are sad, that without sadness there is no happiness. A world devoid of sadness has no happiness. In that, without low lows, you cannot have high highs. If it wasn’t for that terrible summer after third grade, moping over the result and beating myself up over it, I wouldn’t have felt the warmth of winning after. We need mountains for valleys to be made, and valleys for mountains to be made. You can’t just have a valley, by definition, it must be surrounded by mountains. In the same way, without valleys, we would simply have large chunks of elevated land; it’s because of valleys that we have mountains. They co-exist. Just like happiness and sadness, just like beginnings and endings. There’s tons of these moments. If it weren’t for boring evenings out at massive family gatherings with people I barely knew, eating food I hated, I wouldn’t have loved the 20-piece Chicken McNuggets I used to get with friends after football games.
If it weren’t for winter nights, I wouldn’t cherish summer nights as much as I do. I wouldn’t cherish the sun out all day—rotating a collection of my favorite t-shirts, getting ready in the morning with sun tickling my skin—if it wasn't for stuffy noses, and wearing big and thick jackets, and exhaling steamed hot air, and sitting here with cold feet because my window is still open. I love summer nights. But I wouldn’t if I didn’t hate winter nights so much.
Sometimes, I think we live life too fast to live. We always seem to miss the good ol’ times, because we never know they were the good ol’ times until they pass. We’re made to reminisce on them, as if that's their defining characteristic.
I’m slightly afraid that after college applications are submitted. I’ll be happy again. But when college results come out and I figure out where I’m going, I’ll be disappointed. I’ll begrudgingly go on next year, knowing I’m back in a rat race where I have to work twice as hard to prove to myself and others that my school name doesn’t define me. Maybe I’ll get to a point of happiness again, but I hate the idea of having to go through so much sadness to get to it. To console myself through it with memories of good ol’ summer nights. It’s a necessary evil, I guess.
I used to love life during those summer nights. I’d start the day at 1pm, eating whatever breakfast I could find or sometimes just waiting until lunch. I’d spend the day watching hour-long YouTube videos, reading random blog posts or opinion pieces, going to the gym or on a run, cooking something, tearing through whatever classical literature or philosophy I was drawn into at the time, and scrolling Twitter and LinkedIn. Days used to blend into late-late nights, 3 or 4am, where I’d either continue whatever I’d been doing before sunset, work on side projects, or listen to music and stare at their lyrics.
It’s raining now, pretty hard actually. I’ve closed the window, but the scent the air left lingers. It makes me hopeful about the future. In a nice rosy pink lenses way. Summer nights used to be full of daydreams. Daydreaming about my future, or girls, or food. Really anything. They were perfect, crystalline and beautiful. As I sit at my desk this winter night, surrounded by the stained, imperfect, rough edges of reality, those summer nights are a wonderful contrast. It’s almost a foreign feeling, pure ecstasy. Blissful and phenomenal.
I remember this one summer night well. It was after fifth grade. It was really nice, window open to children playing outside, sun beaming through the dirty glass onto my dad’s home office table. Big monitor and keyboard in front of me, I’d decided I was going to write a book. I’d taken liking to Microsoft Word; after all, it’s what the professionals used. It was fancy, pristine, and refined. I spent that month writing the book. It was about a family separated across a massive planet after their rocket malfunctioned in their escape from an alien-riddled Earth. Not a great plot, but it had enough of a mix of science-fiction and openness to creativity that I was hooked. I have a copy of the manuscript open in another window right now. It’s really bad. But to twelve-year-old me, it was the greatest piece of literature I had ever drafted.
Summer nights were a pursuit of joy. Nothing was because I had to, not like those stupid GATE practice booklets, or homework, or grades. From Twitter to sci-fi, I had the freedom to do whatever I wished. I’m a firm believer that happiness, and a true sense of self, comes from freedom. When you aren’t pretending to be someone you’re not, when you don’t have to do things because of some external pressure. I was happy those summer nights, much more than I am this winter night.
Summer nights remind me of family movies. Of passion. Of daydreams. Of books. Of Fruit Loop breakfast. Of happiness. Of freedom. I think those are what I am. Maybe the reason I love summer nights so much is because of what they mean, what they make me think of, and what they are.
Summer nights remind me of me.