The Strange Grief of No Summer Break
Work doesnât end the way school did. It just changes weeks
The worst part about August was the smell.
New shoes.
Hot pavement.
Plastic folders.
That cheap paper smell from notebooks your mom bought in a ten-pack because somehow you needed five subjects even though half your classes felt like the same slow punishment with different posters on the wall.
You could feel school coming before it got there.
It was in the commercials.
The Target aisles.
The way adults started saying things like âback to routineâ with this awful little brightness in their voice.
Like routine was a gift.
Like anyone wanted to trade bike rides and staying up too late for a desk that had somebody elseâs old gum fossilized underneath it.
And still, even with all that dread, school had something work doesnât.
It ended.
That sounds small until you get older.
It is not small.
It is everything.
School could be miserable in very specific ways.
A math problem staring back at you like it knew your fatherâs secrets.
A science worksheet you folded into your backpack and hoped would somehow complete itself through shame.
A book you were supposed to read but mostly carried around like a prop.
Some teacher with dry hands and tired eyes telling you this would prepare you for the real world.
Which was funny.
Because the real world turned out to be worse lighting, more passwords, and adults saying âcircle backâ like they werenât all slowly being digested by the same machine.
But school, at least, had walls around the suffering.
A semester.
A quarter.
A grading period.
A bell.
You could bomb a test and feel like your life was over for six hours.
You could sit in class with your hoodie strings in your mouth, watching the clock move like it had been injured.
You could drag yourself through a week so boring it felt medically dangerous.
But May was out there.
June was out there.
Summer was always standing somewhere behind the building, smoking a cigarette, waiting for you.
That last week of school had a charge to it.
Everybody felt it.
Teachers stopped caring with dignity.
Kids got louder.
The halls smelled like dust and sweat and old paper.
The desks looked abandoned before anyone had left.
Someone was signing a yearbook with a lie about hanging out soon.
Someone was cleaning out a locker and finding a permission slip from October.
Someone was wearing shorts too early because hope makes people stupid and beautiful.
And then one day, it was done.
Not spiritually.
Not metaphorically.
Actually done.
The bell rang.
You walked out.
The air hit your face.
Your backpack was full of crushed worksheets, broken pencils, and whatever version of yourself had survived the year.
And you could say it.
Yeah.
That sucked.
But itâs behind me now.
God, what a luxury.
To have something hard become past tense.
Work does not do that.
Work just keeps changing shirts.
Monday comes in wearing Tuesdayâs face.
A bad week ends, but the work doesnât know it died.
It follows you home.
It sits in the passenger seat.
It watches you reheat dinner.
It stands in the bathroom doorway while you brush your teeth.
You close the laptop and still feel the blue light behind your eyes.
You answer one email and three more show up like rats in the wall.
You finish a task and the reward is another task with worse breath.
There is no last day.
No locker cleanout.
No teacher giving up and wheeling in a TV.
No hot June afternoon where everyone spills out of the building half-feral and suddenly alive again.
There is only the calendar.
The inbox.
The next thing.
The thing after that.
The little red notification sitting there like a bloodshot eye.
And the strange part is, you can be good at it and still feel ruined by it.
Thatâs the ugly trick.
You can know how to do the job.
You can be useful.
Reliable.
Sharp.
The person people trust when the system coughs up something weird and manual and annoying.
And still feel your insides scraping the floor by Thursday.
Because work does not only take the hours.
It takes the clean edge off your life.
It blurs everything.
Your morning is not yours because you wake up bracing.
Your lunch is not yours because you eat like youâre being hunted.
Your evening is not yours because part of you is already negotiating with tomorrow.
Even rest gets infected.
You sit down and canât settle.
You put on a show and miss half of it because your brain is still walking through some stupid unresolved thing from earlier.
You get quiet.
Not peaceful quiet.
More like appliance quiet.
Still running.
Still warm.
Still plugged into something you donât remember choosing.
And everybody acts like this is normal because it is.
Thatâs the sickest part.
Itâs normal.
People talk about burnout like itâs a weather pattern.
Like you just dress for it.
Like, oh yeah, itâs been bad lately.
As if itâs rain.
As if it isnât a whole generation of people driving home with their jaws locked, wondering why a life with a job and a phone and a streaming service still feels like standing in line forever.
And then somebody says retirement.
Like thatâs supposed to make your chest unclench.
Retirement.
The beautiful promise at the end of the fluorescent tunnel.
Give the machine your mornings, your spine, your patience, your best moods, your cleanest years, and maybe later, when your knees sound like bubble wrap and your blood pressure has its own personality, you can sit outside on a Tuesday without guilt.
Thatâs the deal.
Thatâs the grand American romance.
A 401(k) and a haunted calendar.
No wonder âCarouselâ still works.
It has that young panic in it.
That feeling of going nowhere fast.
Back then it sounded like being sixteen and restless and sick of the suburbs.
Now it sounds like the adult version of the same trap.
Round and round.
Same horse.
Same lights.
Same music.
Same stupid painted smile on the thing carrying you in circles.
And everyone outside the ride thinks movement means progress.
It doesnât.
Sometimes movement is just motion with better branding.
Sometimes youâre not building a life.
Sometimes youâre just surviving the spin and calling it discipline because that sounds less sad.
I think thatâs what I miss about school.
Not the homework.
Not the rules.
Not raising your hand to ask for permission to have a human body.
I miss the mercy of completion.
I miss a hard thing ending cleanly.
I miss walking out into heat so bright it made the whole world look forgiven.
I miss the first stupid day of summer when there was nothing due tomorrow.
No assignment.
No meeting.
No follow-up.
No polite little note with an exclamation point pretending not to be a demand.
Just a day.
A real one.
Long.
Warm.
A little boring.
Yours.
And maybe that is the part adulthood keeps stealing.
Not joy exactly.
Ownership.
The feeling that your life belongs to you in stretches long enough to feel it.
Work gives you pieces.
An hour here.
A weekend there.
A vacation you have to earn, request, defend, schedule, and recover from.
Tiny scraps of summer handed back like evidence.
And youâre supposed to be grateful.
Sometimes you are.
Sometimes you sit in your car after work with the engine off and the song still playing because going inside means starting the second shift of being a person.
Dishes.
Laundry.
Dinner.
Texts.
Money.
Love.
Body.
Face.
Sleep.
All of it waiting.
All of it reasonable.
All of it too much.
So you sit there a little longer.
Blink-182 coming through tired speakers.
The parking lot getting darker.
Your phone facedown.
Your whole life quiet for once, but not fixed.
Just quiet.
And for three minutes, nobody can ask you for anything.
Thatâs the summer now.
Not three months.
Three minutes.
A song in the car.
A slow shower.
Coffee before the day touches you.
The walk from the building to the parking lot when the air feels almost kind.
A night where you decide the workday is dead even if the work is not.
Maybe that has to count.
Maybe we have to stop waiting for someone to ring the bell.
Maybe the bell is smaller now.
Meaner.
Harder to hear.
Maybe it sounds like closing the laptop.
Maybe it sounds like not checking the email.
Maybe it sounds like saying, out loud, to nobody,
Enough.
Thatâs behind me for tonight.
And maybe it isnât enough.
Of course it isnât.
But itâs something.
A hand on the brake.
A foot on the ground.
A little rebellion against the ride.
Because the carousel keeps going.
It always does.
Round and round with its cheap lights and pretty lies.
But every once in a while, you have to step off.
Even if only for a song.
Even if only in the dark.
Even if summer is gone and nobody is coming to save you with a final bell.
You still get to leave the building.
You still get to feel the air hit your face.
You still get to say,
not all of me belongs to this.
// Scorpio Veil
