Once late May hits and it’s truly the beginning of summer, I start to feel nostalgic for reading novels by Sarah Dessen. The nostalgia was first nameable in 2024. My partner and I had just gone to the YMCA pool and then we got snow cones at the little snow cone shack in the parking lot and it all just seemed perfect. The sky was bright blue, his shirt was crispy white, the snow cone was artificially bright red, we both felt tired and smelled like chlorine and sunscreen. Sitting there with the person I loved and eating liquid sugar on ice felt like swimming in the good undertones of high school again. I remembered what it felt like to read recipes on Lauren Conrad’s website, try Pinterest workouts before “runfluencer” was a word, and oh yeah, to be excited about learning calculus.
I loved Sarah Dessen’s novels because her characters were always solving problems I wasn’t allowed to have. They navigated relationships with boys, made up with friends who they hadn’t talked to since elementary school, and invented new personalities for themselves to go with every variation of their name. By contrast, I was a serious-person-who-knew-my-purpose-which-was-fulfilling-my-role-as-a-woman-of-God-by-having-children-with-a-serious-man-after-getting-a-four-year-degree-as-backup-in-case-he-got-hit-by-a-truck. I already had the answers. In the algebra of life, I had found X*. Dessen’s characters were still looking. In my hubris, I called her novels “cupcake books,” something I was allowed to read every once in a while but couldn’t take seriously.
Life never works out how we think it will. I’m thirty now, half a lifetime later and I did marry the high school boyfriend who made me laugh, I only have one kid and he’s the best, I do have an actual career, and somehow it all feels just perfect. Because the kid wakes up so early, I’ve recently found myself regularly running again before 7:00 am for the first time since high school. Muscle memory has a way of jogging regular memories and I find myself thinking about posting my oatmeal on tumblr, wanting to reblog pictures of running shoes, and ditching big thoughts in favor of being myself without criticizing myself. Real life was turning out to be more like calculus; that is, not about finding X, but about describing how X changes.
The one conspiracy theory I allow myself is that time is not linear. Instead, I believe it loops along in a chain, something like this:
After travelling into the future, we loop our way back for a minute and revisit some important point before heading on again for real, like tracking a single point on a wheel using parametric equations in calculus. This spring, I was responsible for scheduling a work event through a catering company and I always thought of one of Dessen’s novels when it came to catering companies. Early this summer, we took our first family trip to the beach, where so many of Dessen’s novels take place. I am making new friends, navigating new relationships that have sprung from being a parent, and realizing that the most beautiful life has come from what I previously thought was so unimportant. This time, when small changes try to make themselves heard over the scraping of my new tennis shoes on the concrete and gravel trails nearby my house, I am trying just to listen.
*Kate Malone from Laurie Halse Anderson’s Catalyst, basically.
Reading with Ally 