Has it been given to someone else this summer? – Wired PR Lifestyle Story

Last winter, I thought how amazing summer would be. I couldn’t wait to lie down on the beach again and see friends every day. I imagined the city coming back to life and feeling that way November 7 all summer long. But a couple of weeks ago, I looked up and it was halfway through the summer, and I didn’t have the revelations I thought I would.

Instead, every day seemed like the first. I continued to work from home; I was having coffee in the morning, avoiding the subway, taking walks. Now that I was fully immersed, I was doing some adventurous things, like going to the movies for the first time in half a year, and I went to the beach once, but where did the rest of the days go? I didn’t dance in the streets more than once! And how was August already ?? I was worried that I would completely miss the victory when I returned to the world, until I realized that no one else around me was doing much. He also felt with everyone I spoke to that the summer was passing and that they hadn’t done anything worthwhile. It was so weird, we all thought we were going to have a shared experience, but in the end we had a completely different experience, all together.

No one anticipated having to process 2020 collectively – what he did with the sense of our time, how he separated us from our loved ones, how we couldn’t travel to places we loved or didn’t have yet. Instead of the triumphant return we hoped for, it seems like an appendix to overflow with the sorrows and frustrations that 2021 brought last year. We live in this new surreal world and we are trying to add parts of our lives before 2020. With the arrival of the variants, there is talk of future blockages and questions about what autumn and winter might be like. Moving forward remains as strange, non-linear, and disorienting as it has been in the last year and a half, and it’s hard to know whether we should feel hopeful or cautious. Maybe both. I’m finding comfort in leaving what this year is, instead of what I expected – to give myself time to calm down and get the wind back.

The summer of 2021 wasn’t our summer, and it’s okay. We have time.

PS 13 readers share their joyful encounters and what unexpected relationships did you have during the pandemic?

(Photo Igor Madjinca / Stocksy.)