my political brat summer

are you ready for fall or should I say the fall of democracy

Maybe 50 years from now, a museum will be interested in my diary entries from the summer of 2025. Somewhere between brat summer, which had trended the year before, and the ever-increasing intensity of the political climate we were forced to live under — even in…summer?! A time when I once thought nothing of hooking up with a stranger under the moonlight, the taste of cheap beer on my tongue mixing with the taste of a cigarette on his, but now have to make sure he isn’t an uneducated idiot voting against women’s rights.

“I stalked him and saw that he went to a pro-Palestine demo in March 2024,” I proudly tell my best friend, shoving proof in the form of an Instagram photo dump under her nose. Our conversations these past months have mostly revolved around everything from making sure we don’t get STDs to making sure the world isn’t collapsing.