The In-Between Month
Often we hold places in our memory in a more perfect form: a super-eight that smooths out rougher edges. You shed the awkwardness, the discomfort, and preserve only what feels pure. You tell yourself it was that way, though some gray static is always humming in the background, holding space for you to edit the story into something neater than it really was.
Last weekend by the sea, I felt that in real time. Newport has lived in my mind as a postcard, though I've only been there once before. But standing on the Cliff Walk, the beauty tangled with reality: the ocean retreating in slow arcs, the god-awful smell of red algea at low tide, a beach I once blew bubbles on appearing less cinematic and more human. Even here, there was both the highlight reel and the hidden noise — the in-between that keeps things honest.
That walk carried me back to another threshold in my life. When I first left for Argentina, I wasn't sure my Spanish would hold up. It turned into a wild ride — one that permanently shifted my accent but also deepened my love of language. Early on, I learned a word that has stayed with me: las orillas. Google will tell you it means shore, edge, margin, or limit. My professor called it the line where sea meets sand. But Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine poet, used it differently: the borderland between city and country, the place where stories blue and truth begins to slip. A no-man's land of murky in-between, named and alive.
I found myself smiling at the water, knowing I had something to write about: this month that feels like this moment of confronting the middle. A time where leisure dissolves into structure and the highlight reel collides with nostalgia and urgency. September is an orilla of its own — proof that beginnings rarely arrive with clarity, but in the muddled overlap between what's fading and what will soon form.
In Washington, this month doesn’t show up clean. It lingers in the haze of late summer heat: ninety degrees pressing against mornings that flirt with crispness. The air is heavy with indecision, sunlight still sharp, but shadows lengthening earlier than they should. Still, the month feels like a beginning.
January has always felt like an imposed ritual — a chilly kind of reset that demands rather than invites. The air is brittle, the days too short, the resolutions written out of guilt instead of possibility.
September, by contrast, carries its own internal momentum. Even as an adult, my body remembers the cadence of the school calendar: a sense of wiping the slate clean, starting again, choosing the outfit for the first day even if no one is watching. The cultural cues conspire, too — back-to-school ads looping on TV, kids clutching backpacks, office supply stores brimming with lined paper and Post-Its. I still feel the phantom urge to do a lap around Staples, as if a fresh pack of pens might anchor me to this sense of renewal.
It’s not only nostalgia. September is when I feel pulled toward order, the kind of order I resist in July, when time drips like honey and long evenings swallow the need for lists. By now I’m making long-delayed doctor’s appointments, checking in with friends I haven’t seen since spring, planning fall travel. It’s a quieter hum: life opening up again after the sprawl of summer. I don’t think of the year as winding down here; I think of it as beginning, a compressed season of activity before winter gives me permission to rest.
September has always carried a note of melancholy, too. The light shifts, slants golden earlier in the evening, and suddenly I’m aware of how quickly things move away from me.
When I was younger, I couldn’t hear the first notes of Wake Me Up When September Ends without feeling it like a punch. That music video burned into me — grief stitched to a month I already associated with unease. At times I dreaded September, the way my stomach would tighten as if the only way to manage transition was through discipline so severe it could crack me open. I thought if I made enough lists, if I forced myself into structure, I could outrun the unease of endings. Or at least avoid an ulcer.
What I’ve learned instead is that I am better with structure — not as a defense against change, but as a way of walking through it. September has become less about scheduling and more about choosing rituals that hold me steady. Cooking recipes that deepen with the season, even as the weather refuses to commit. Dusting off jackets that still carry last year’s dust, knowing I’ll wear them into the ground anyway. Relearning the pleasure of mornings that cool my skin just enough to need another layer.
Culturally, September is marked by clichés: pumpkin spice, college football, and the churn of election cycles. But it’s also the quiet cultural pivot where we collectively tighten our grip, moving from summer looseness to fall’s more serious hum. The way sidewalks feel busier in the evenings, gyms crowded again, calendars clogged with conferences and events. We’re all participating in the same hinge moment, even if our rituals differ.
Not a big Starbucks person, but I know what it means for someone else to begin their season with that taste. I don’t buy new notebooks, but I understand the urge to hold something blank and hopeful in your hands.
September, to me, is proof we can hold contradictions without splitting apart. It is both melancholy and renewal. It is where I allow myself to feel two things at once — to look backward even as I step forward. The month itself embodies this duality: hot afternoons that melt into crisp evenings, waning daylight cut by the sharp edge of early darkness.
If January demands that we reinvent, September reminds us we can return. To our habits, structure, our better selves. It doesn’t ask us to become someone new; it asks us to remember how to begin again.
The in-between is not a failure of definition but a place where two seasons, two selves, can coexist. A shoreline of its own, where what's ending presses up against what's beginning.
And so it starts. With acceptance that nothing starts cleanly, but everything starts somewhere. For me, it's September.