August, and turning a year

The light has begun repaying what it borrowed in June, a few minutes every night, and I count them the way other people count interest. I keep the month open on purpose, and have for years; of all the hours I keep, these are the ones I guard most carefully. It began as good sense. It has become the closest thing I have to a private season: an open month stands in the year like the one unfurnished room in a house, and everything that crosses it echoes.

Early in the month I sat down with last year's diary and read the year back. I keep it in ink, and for reasons anyone in my position will understand, it holds no names. I had never quite noticed what that does to a year. Stripped of who, it keeps only what and how: a long dinner that moved to the window seat when the rain arrived, a first evening that began with two careful strangers and ended with neither, an afternoon I still think about and never wrote down properly, out of superstition. A diary without names turns out to be an honest one. It cannot flatter anybody, so all it can record is whether the hours were alive.

There is a reason I do the reading in August, and I will give it exactly the space it asks for. My birthday falls in this month, a few days from where I sit writing. I treat it the way I treat the mirror in the hall: one honest look on the way out of the door, and then the evening. But the honest look never stays sober. I sit down to take stock and stand up with an appetite, and somewhere past the second page the ledger turns into a menu. I have learned to trust that turn. Arithmetic tells me where a year went. Appetite tells me where it is going.

So the appetite gets written down too, while the month is still mine. More long tables, and more of the talk that only surfaces after the second hour. More first drinks in hotel bars, chosen well, early enough that the day has let go. More evenings that climb to a quieter floor and stay there while the city carries on without us. Beginnings above all. A beginning is the one part of an evening that cannot be done twice, and I have become a collector; the shelf is long, I know every piece on it, and still it is the next one I think about most. That is the trick a birthday plays on an honest woman. Taking stock was meant to close the books, and instead it opens the diary.

None of it, in the end, needed a birthday for permission. A kept month is its own occasion, and the people who are fond of me seem to know it without being told: August brings small parcels and long letters, and the letters last longer. There is a quiet page for attentions, for anyone whose fondness takes that shape, and it already says everything I am willing to say on the subject. What I will say here is simpler. The year ahead has my appetite, the month is open, the dark is coming back a few minutes at a time, and somewhere in it is a first evening I have never had. If it should turn out to be yours, you would be welcome to write to me. I read slowly in August. There is room.