#1 Summer of Grief — Watermelon Is a Good Remedy

The heat makes everything slower — thoughts, limbs, time itself. It’s the kind of heat that presses down on your skin and fogs up your mind. Still, somewhere beneath it all, something insists on being written. Maybe it’s grief. Maybe it’s the memory trying not to disappear.

For years now, I’ve been trying to write about grief: what it feels like, where it lives in the body, how it shows up in the smallest things. But often my thoughts spiral in different directions, impossible to tie down with words. That’s why I’ve decided to give this theme to the summer, or maybe, to recognize that summer has always held grief for me, and maybe also for others. Not just the grief of people or places lost, but also of time, memories, moments. A kind of soft mourning for who we once were, and for what will never return.

This evening, I sat by the water with my partner, along the canals in Amsterdam. A year ago, I was in Antwerp, sweating through long, airless days in a concrete city with little shade and nowhere to swim. I remembered how lost I felt then — unsure of what I wanted, where I belonged, or who I needed around me. And yet, there’s one thread of continuity: the same person sitting beside me now was there then too. Maybe that’s all we can ask for — one constant line in a story that keeps unraveling.

Grief is bigger than loss. It’s about the things we can no longer hold. Fleeting moments that meant everything at the time. Snapshots of joy, sorrow, longing — gone before we knew they’d mattered.

It’s 11:31 p.m. on July 1st, the hottest July day ever recorded in the Netherlands (update: my partner reminded me it’s not the hottest day ever — just today. But I’m too stubborn to change my sentence). I’m unsure if the heat is something to be grateful for. But I do know that the night carries something the day cannot. Words come easier in the cool of evening, when your skin isn’t dripping with sweat and your mind finally quiets down. Reflection needs space. Heat takes that away.

Today, I didn’t call my parents. But I thought about them. About the distances between us — not just miles, but the emotional spaces that grow wider in the summer. Who do you share a barbecue with when your family isn’t close by? Who fills that place?

Today, grief was in the heat, in the longing for elsewhere. For those places I once visited where time slowed down, where summer wasn’t just something to endure. Maybe that’s what we’re really after: the slowing down of things. A kind of stillness we rarely find here in the Netherlands.

Also: watermelon is a good remedy. For heat. For grief. For everything you can’t quite name.