The Summer Before I Knew Myself

When I think of that summer, it always starts with the cicadas. Their sound wasn’t just noise; it lived inside the air, inside my teeth, inside the boards of the porch. It was a kind of weather. A shimmer that made everything feel a little far away, as if the whole neighborhood was already a memory even while we were still living it.

I can still see the porch. The paint curling like dried petals, thin enough to flake off onto the backs of my thighs when I sat too long. The wood held the heat no matter the hour. It smelled of old summers sunk deep into the grain, a sweetness that hovered between sun-warm sap and the slow creep of mildew.

We drank lemonade from glass jars sweating in the heat. I remember pressing one to my forehead, letting the chill startle me back into my body. Everything else was sticky — the air, my hands, my skin, the day itself.

I was eight. Bare feet, dirt smudges on my shins, sugar crusting my palms. I sat on the top step watching my brother build a cardboard fort from boxes scavenged behind the grocery store. He worked with unbelievable concentration, brow furrowed, tongue caught between his teeth. In his hands, those sagging boxes were architecture. Possibility. A castle.

That’s how I always told the story. The summer of the cardboard fort. The last summer before the world widened and the simplicity cracked. A story with shape. With weight. Something I could return to when I needed to remember who we were then — or who I believed we were.

I remember wanting to help. And I remember getting in the way. I bent the cardboard wrong, pulled tape too early, knocked things over. He snapped — quick, sharp — and I cried my way back inside, the screen door rattling shut behind me. I curled on the couch with my arms around my knees, listening to the fan whir its lazy circle. Later, he came to me with a grape soda, his peace offering. I forgave him instantly. Of course I did.

That moment — the sting, the apology, the shared syrupy soda — rooted itself deep. A lesson I couldn’t name then- how people hurt us, and we let them. How we leave each other, and return. How love takes shape in the mending.

Last week, my mother sent me an old photo album she’d found in the attic. I flipped through without thinking, expecting nothing new. And then I stopped.

There was the porch. The lemonade. The shimmer of heat. The cardboard fort — half-collapsed in a way I didn’t remember.

But the kid building it — kneeling, brow furrowed, tongue caught between their teeth — wasn’t my brother.

It was me.

For a moment, I actually waited for the picture to correct itself. As if memory might push through paper and ink and rearrange the truth back into something familiar. I kept telling myself he must’ve just stepped inside.

That he was just out of frame. That the camera had simply missed him.

But the longer I looked, the more still the image became. The more it asserted itself.

This was the moment. And he wasn’t in it.

Something in my chest shifted, very quietly, like a door easing open in a room I hadn’t stepped into in years.

I picked up the phone.

My mother answered on the third ring, her voice warm and distracted, something clattering in the background — grocery bags, keys, the hum of her ordinary afternoon.

“Do you remember that summer?” I asked.

“The one with the cardboard fort on the porch?”

I heard her smile through the phone. “The one you built? Of course I do. You worked on that thing all week.”

I swallowed. “No — he built it. I was helping. He was showing me how to fold the cardboard so it wouldn’t collapse.”

There was a small stretch of quiet. Not confusion. Just recognition of the space between what I remembered and what was real.

“Sweetheart,” she said, softer now, careful.

“Your brother was at camp. You did it yourself. You wouldn’t stop until that thing stood upright. You kept calling me outside to look.” A gentle laugh. “I must have taken twenty pictures.”

The quiet after that went deeper than the silence that came before.

She didn’t try to explain it. I didn’t ask her to.

She just said, the way you say something that has always been true, “You were always determined like that. Even when something kept falling apart.”

It didn’t sound like praise. It didn’t sound like correction. It sounded like a door unlocking.

We ended the call simply — something about remembering to eat, a soft “love you,” a rustle, a click.

The house felt different when I set the phone down. Still — but not empty.

I looked again at the photograph. At the fort leaning, barely holding. At the child kneeling in the heat, sleeves stuck to her arms, expression set with a seriousness far bigger than eight years old.

She wasn’t waiting for someone to help her. She wasn’t bracing for someone to show her how.

She was just building.

And I realized I had spent years remembering myself as the one who needed steadiness. The one who only stood because someone steadied me.

But the truth in the photograph was clearer than the memory had ever been-

I stood because I stood.

I sat there with the photo album open in my lap, the house humming quietly around me. The cicadas were long gone, the porch was long gone, the summer was long gone — but the child in the picture was right there.

Not imagined. Not borrowed. Not built from longing.

Real.

I had spent so many years believing that what steadied me had come from someone else. Some older, wiser presence. Someone who understood things I didn’t yet have words for. But the truth was simpler. I had been holding myself up from the beginning. I just didn’t know how to see it.

Memory isn’t always accurate. It isn’t meant to be. It’s not an archive — it’s a compass. It points toward what mattered, what we needed, what shaped us.

Sometimes it adds a person who wasn’t there. Sometimes it sands down the hard edges. Sometimes it turns a cardboard fort into something sturdier, something big enough to shelter a whole childhood.

But sitting there, looking at that photograph, I felt something I hadn’t felt before — not nostalgia, not sadness, not loss.

Recognition.

The kid in that picture was small, yes. But she was also fierce. She tried, and tried, and tried again. Even when the walls sagged.

Even when everything leaned the wrong way. Even when it all fell down.

And she didn’t give up.

So maybe the story I’ve been carrying all these years wasn’t wrong. It was just unfinished.

Because the heart of it — the part that mattered — was never about someone holding me steady.

It was about learning that I already could.

And once you see that — truly see it —

you can’t unsee it.

That child is still here. Still mine. Still building.

And that is enough.