The Last Summer Before Everything Changed

The Last Summer Before Everything Changed

24 August 2025

Mama thinks I’m at the library. I’m at the Stadionbad again, same spot on the concrete steps by the big pool. The water smells like chlorine and summer that’s already starting to die.

The girls from my class are here again. They laugh like nothing bad will ever happen to them. I pretend to read but I’m just watching them. I know this is the last summer I can still sit here without looking like a creep. Next year I’ll be “too old” for this.

Everything is ending so quietly. School. This version of me. The way the light hits the water at 6:37 pm. Even the ice cream truck guy looked sad today when he gave me the change.

I don’t want to become an adult. They all look tired and pretend they chose it.

I wish this summer could just stay stupid and warm forever.

25 August 2025

The heat is turning violent. It doesn’t warm you anymore; it pins you down. The air above the asphalt trembles, and the Prater trees look exhausted, their leaves coated in a fine layer of urban dust.

I told Mama I was writing a paper on the socio-economic shifts in interwar Vienna. She smiled and gave me ten euros for lunch. I used it to buy an entry ticket and a portion of fries that tasted mostly of old frying fat and resignation.

The girls are here. Klara, Sophie, and the one with the sharp collarbones whose name I keep forgetting. They are arranged on their towels like geometry, shifting every twenty minutes to catch the exact angle of the sun. I want them to look at me, but if they actually did, I would hate them for ruining the tragedy of my invisibility.

I sit three steps up. The concrete burns through my towel. A few meters to my left, an older couple is fighting. The woman, wearing a neon pink bikini that requires more confidence than she possesses, yells at her husband because he forgot the cooling elements for their bag.

“We are sitting here like animals!” she screams, gesturing at a warm bottle of Almdudler.

He is doing a Sudoku puzzle and looks entirely at peace with being an animal. I laughed, a quiet, ugly sound, and immediately felt my face heat up, hoping no one heard. No one did. You can disappear in the Stadionbad if you just sit still enough.

Later, I bought a Jolly ice cream. I didn’t want it. I sat on the hot edge of the footbath and let it melt. I wanted to see how long it would take for the wasps to arrive. Four minutes. They descended on the sweet, sticky puddle with a desperate, furious greed, plunging their bodies into the neon sugar until their wings were too thick to fly. I watched them struggle against their own gluttony, and I felt nothing but a mild, clinical interest.

26 August 2025

The lie is getting complicated. The library sends automated emails about reserved books I never pick up. I intercept them on Mama’s tablet before she wakes up. It’s an exhausting bureaucracy of deception, but I can’t stop coming here.

The light is changing. The Blue Hour arrives earlier now. The sharp, blinding glare of July has softened into a bruised, golden slant that stretches the shadows of the diving platforms all the way across the sports pool.

Today, I noticed the man.

He sits two rows below me. He must be fifty, maybe older. He has thin grey hair, leathery skin cooked dark by decades of public pools, and a perfectly symmetrical, faded blue towel. He doesn’t swim. He doesn’t read the Kronen Zeitung like the other old men. He just sits there. And he watches the teenagers.

Not with lust. That would be banal. He watches them with a hollow, starving grief. It is chronological despair. He watches the way they sprint across the wet, slippery tiles without fear of breaking a hip, the way they throw their heads back to drink from plastic bottles, the absolute arrogant certainty of their own permanence.

He is mourning his own ghost.

At 6:15 pm, as the lifeguards in their white polo shirts began blowing their whistles to clear the far meadow, the man turned his head. We made eye contact. He didn’t look away. He just raised his chin by a fraction of a millimeter. An acknowledgment. You are in the waiting room too.

I got up, gathered my things with clumsy, panicked hands, and left. On my way out, I stepped over a wet plaster clinging to the white tiles of the footbath, shaped exactly like a comma holding back a sentence about decay.

27 August 2025

A thunderstorm broke the heatwave last night. The air smells like wet earth and cold ozone.

I went to the library today. Actually went. The reading room was silent, smelling of floor wax and old paper. I sat at a desk by the window, opened a book I didn’t care about, and watched the rain streak the glass.

I felt safe for about twenty minutes. Then I looked at the adults around me.

A man in a cheap grey suit violently highlighting a textbook on corporate tax law. A woman staring blankly at a blinking cursor, her shoulders curved inward like a collapsed bridge. They all looked like they were participating in a mandatory drill for a war they had already lost.

I packed my bag and took the U2 to Stadion.

I walked to the pool in the rain. I didn’t go in. I stood by the chain-link fence near the back entrance. The water in the big pool was choppy, iron-grey, and completely empty. The plastic loungers were stacked in brutalist towers. The summer was dead, and the corpse was being efficiently cleared away by the municipal authorities.

I stood in the rain until my jacket soaked through, gripping the wet metal of the fence. I realized I wasn’t mourning the girls, or the sun, or the smell of sunscreen. I was mourning the luxury of doing absolutely nothing of consequence, and believing it mattered.

12 September 2025

School starts tomorrow.

The entry gates at the Stadionbad are locked. A handwritten sign taped to the glass booth says Saisonende. Danke! The exclamation mark is a lie.

I took the 11A bus back toward the city. The bus was filled with people carrying briefcases, groceries, and damp umbrellas. No one was laughing. The hydraulic doors snapped shut with a definitive hiss, slicing the season off from the rest of my life.

I didn’t look out the window as the bus pulled away. I kept my hand in my pocket, turning over the cold coins the ice cream truck driver had given me weeks ago. They felt much heavier now.