Essays
Fragments of Summer
Diary Excerpts from June to September 2025
[April 9 – June 13]
No entries.
[June 14]
It's been so long since I've last written that I might as well have lived a whole life between my entries. There is so much to tell. It's as if I cannot bear to write as I live, that I need to drink it all in and ferment it like wine, the distillation happening somewhere inside my heart before I can pour it out with my hands. What a way to go about memory, addicted to reflecting.
I always try to remember: God will pull us in the direction of dreams we never knew we had.
I regret some that I haven't taken care to record my days as faithfully as I'd hoped, that some memories might fade from grip... But then I also appreciate the ephemerality of a moment, or a memory. How imprecise its edges are, how it reinvents itself in time or washes itself away. I still like to think of God, for whom there is no ephemerality, no reinvention, no washing away. Only all that there is, has been, will be. That maybe we have been given a gift in our forgetfulness, as we can savor the aftertaste of feeling even when the flavor itself is unrecalled.
[June 22]
I am enchanted with the world. There is so much of it and so little of me, and yet it is those large, engulfing cities that make me feel so endless and brimming with possibility. It's those small places, the suffocating spaces, where I feel my limits. It's a paradox that I should feel so grand only in the places where I am minute, and feel so reduced in the places where I have my best chance at being known.
…I am maybe a cog in a machine designed for remembrance. It doesn't feel wrong, or sad. I think of her, I hold that thought fondly for a moment, then the river flows along.
Exploitative, maybe even. So many lives I entangle with mine by writing about them from my perspective.
I desire consistency. If I want certain things in life, I am going to have to expect things of others in my life and hold them to it. It can't just be touch and go. Maybe I even deserve it because I can provide it, at least when I commit. When I will ever commit is another question, but that's not something for me to know tonight.
[July 12]
I'm back from California… and once again I've gone so long without writing. I don't know why I'm so fearful of it, that I avoid it although I love it so much. At least in this capacity— I've written so many poems I adore since…. What about this is so different? Maybe it feels futile, or that because I will be so scared to revisit past versions of myself. Despite my even tone, choice of word. Call myself pretentious or self-absorbed. I'm not sure.
[July 13]
Dad didn't want to take me to church today so I laid out naked outside until Nona told me to go to the mall and buy some airpods…. I hated the mall. I always do.
[July 14]
I don't want to be his favorite person or his best friend.
I think I am fine with myself. Even when I am a complete embarrassment or I am devoid of energy or motivation. I am still worthy under all my rougher layers. Especially because I am so willing to peel back other's layers to try to see their good souls. Someone could do the same for me.
[July 15]
I've always found a way to be grateful on the other side of everything— and yet I cannot find a way to be grateful now… It just feels unending and insurmountable.
And it seems others see something within me that I cannot be entirely sure of.
Maybe it's not too late to start taking myself seriously. I know that's silly to think at 21, but sometimes I feel so old. I'm on the cusp of the age where anything I do is ordinary unless I make it remarkable.
[July 16]
I feel lost within my own time.
Even just thinking about next year's uncertainty makes me feel this sensation of displacement. I wish I could have one vision of the future— one where I wake up and realize everything turned out better than anything I could have dreamt for myself.
[July 21]
The moment I stepped in the door I had a vodka cranberry shoved in my hand. I was placed on display on a table booth seat as if I was a piece of cake myself…. I was just as stiff and inhibited as if I was in a U.N. meeting or any other high stakes professional setting.
I made it back to Portland in one piece.
Instead of getting angry with others, I try to self-reflect.
[July 28]
We talked about how people are using AI to "express themselves" and "articulate their feelings" but in reality it invents the experience— creating something to project an emotional state onto, rather than something reflecting inward-out. It's a perversion.
I feel grateful that I'm far from lonely.
At times it feels as if my life is blooming around me. At others, it feels as if the petals are shriveling, encasing me inside as it decays. I wish I knew what was really happening. I wish I knew which feeling to trust. I think it may be the answer to accept the feelings as they are, but assign no greater meaning to them, or treat them as any special indicators or signs. Just feelings. I can turn myself to the attention of true circumstance, which is that my life until college starts will feel, in a peculiar way, tedious and laborious, despite the fact that I am at rest. But rest is not invigorating to me, and its excess drains ambition. I find myself listless, and without purpose. There is only the sun, the passing time. Its warmth encasing like amber, the image of myself becomes frozen. It's as if there is no wind for my wings. Still, I love sitting in the setting sun. It's a bright sort of melancholy I can find as I watch it leave the horizon, and consequently, leave me.
[August 1]
I feel so dizzied by only two days of my life.
[August 2]
…yet I find myself wanting to be another member of the straight world— completely assimilated, no different from anyone else. I liked the quote on the wall— "Don't let fear keep you from being true to yourself." It's so simple, but so difficult. I keep letting fear rule me. I need to move past that.
To have the comfort of being held with there being nothing more to it. That they won't try to sleep with me, just hold me to hold me. I don't get that a lot.
…my hoping she's okay, and devastation that there's nothing I can— or, at least, should— do for her.
[August 6]
He cried some, about me…
He says he's going to shave his hair.
[August 7]
Our hearts become free when we act in accordance with our beliefs.
I hope when we get to heaven God will not count for us the ways we fell short, but the ways in which we brought more good into the world than could have been found before…. I feel a great deal of peace… I can hold onto my tranquility as it lasts.
But for now, we can dare to open ourselves to others, accept the risk of misunderstanding for the hope of connection, conversation.
[August 10]
S slept over and psychoanalyzed my perfume collection, and said that I am "deeply masculine but not afraid to explore all parts of my expression" which seems about right.
…forgiveness lies in the heart of the person wronged.
I realized just how brilliant and creative all my friends are, and how grateful I should be to know people doing such unique things with their lives.
[August 18]
I do my very best not to think of all the ways in which any given event could have happened, rather I try to focus on what did in reality. And yet not speculating is a great difficulty itself when it offsets the discomfort of reality. In reality, I feel sort of unbreakable.
How cruel it is that the condition of my womanhood is that I should experience the same desire and yet it means something about me— brands me, in a way, others me— and for him it is nothing at all. Completely meaningless.
I was alone today but I seldom felt lonely. I feel generally satisfied with my life and friendships. I have this feeling, despite the missing, that everything will be okay. I spent some time reading in the sunshine— maybe that's a part of it. And, at least I know this now: if you try to see the light in everyone, you'll end up blinded.
[August 19]
I am not strong, no.
Listening to You Want It Darker by Leonard Cohen. Staring down my copy of Infinite Resignation. Perhaps I'll finish it.
[August 28]
C says as long as I don't drink so much and I stay focused I might really do something remarkable with my life.
I am in California now. I delight in my nona's friends and the sunshine, whenever it comes. I'm rather tan now.
[September 11]
I get so caught up in college that I hardly wish to dedicate any time to my personal writing, though this is important both to and for me.
…I am loosening my grip on hope, which itself is a disease, and obsession.
…I think I understand it now: no one has to earn our love. If we give it to them, it's there, they have it. But others do, to some extent, have to earn our relationships with them. We can give love freely because it is infinite and a completely unrestricted resource, but our time, our devotion, our energies are not. These are all finite.
I can hardly think of things my hands haven't done.
I'm so apathetic that the suggestion that I'd even have an opinion is nearly insulting.
[September 15]
Monday came again like a recurring cough.
…we made eye contact, which was cinematic and unsettling.
Lord help me.
[September 17]
I could go anywhere. I could do anything, be anything. I've always been passionate. I fight endlessly even when I'm not sure what I'm fighting for is worth the battle.
I have a lot of love in my life…. And for that I should find myself lucky. So many people receive no love at all. Some people are truly forgotten in this world. I am going to open myself up as much as possible.
I am going to do something important with my life because I want to show God how grateful I am for my life.
[September 22]
I can't let go of the fact that I miss her dearly.
I want my life to agree with the type of person I want to be… I've compromised myself because I wanted the company but I can no longer accept those conditions.
It's hard when nothing seems all that fulfilling, it makes it seem as if anything, then, is permissible because the outcome is all the same anyway.
I can fall out of myself, go somewhere else.
She seems a bit scared of me— like she knows that I'm shifty, prone to movement, that I could move through and past her.
[September 25]
I've been trying not to say anything unless what I have to say is insightful.
The pomegranate wine I brought was bitter and unsatisfying.
I live in the black and white of books and walk in a world not all that much more colorful.
[September 29]
"Self-consciousness is the cuck chair of the mind." -J
Today I woke up feeling lighter. I woke up without a cloud in my mind. I walked through my day with a quiet determination. I think things will be better for me. I have to do what I do best— hope, pray, work, and wait.
I've resolved to spend time in the thesis tower this evening. I could spend an eternity here, with the windows revealing a black world and the warm lamps glow over cerulean chairs. If purgatory wasn't a sort of punishment, I would wish for it to be just like this, except all to myself.
I wish I knew definitively all the things which make life satisfying and fulfilling. I'm not sure it's one thing… but the right combination of success and strife. Something to pull you forward and also to keep you back.
Piper S. McKeever is a philosophy student, poet, and the founding editor of Aphor Magazine. You can keep up with her myriad adventures at pipermckeever.com.