It is a grey Sunday near the end of September and you have finally pulled the plastic bin out from under the bed. The striped shirt goes in first, the one you wore to that rooftop in July when the ice melted before anyone finished a drink. The collar still smells faintly of sunscreen. You kneel on the lid to force the last of the air out, and something in your chest goes down with it.
It seems out of proportion, and you know it. These are cotton and linen and a pair of sandals with a broken buckle, going into storage for six months, not being lost at sea. But you were not putting away the shirt. You were putting away the evening you wore it.
That is the part nobody warns you about: clothes keep time better than calendars do. The linen trousers hold the salt line from the day you walked into the water with them still on. The right sandal is worn down on the outside edge, because that is how you actually walk, and no photograph of you has ever recorded that. Your body wrote on these things all summer without asking your permission.
And there is no ritual for this. Nobody holds a funeral for a season. So the sadness has nowhere to put itself down, and it arrives sideways, at four in the afternoon, over a laundry basket, in a person who thought they were only being organised.
It helps to notice what makes clothes different from pictures. A photograph watched the summer from a small distance. The shirt was inside it, warm, sweated through, spilled on, worn thin at one shoulder from the strap of a bag you carried everywhere. You are not looking at evidence. You are holding the thing that was there.
Which means the ache is not a malfunction. It is a receipt. A season you never really lived wouldn't hurt to put away, and the summers that pass without touching you go into the bin without a sound. This one is heavy because it landed.
And it is worth remembering what the lid actually is. This is not a goodbye; it is a lid. In March you will drag the same bin out and be handed a version of yourself you had half forgotten, and a folded shirt will smell of the cupboard and, underneath that, still faintly of July. Meanwhile there is a coat waiting with a ticket stub in the pocket from a night you have not thought about since.
So maybe do not seal everything. Keep one thing out where you can see it, a thin cotton shirt on the back of the chair, something to wear under a sweater in November when the light goes at half past four. The summer does not have to be argued with or thanked or finished properly. It only has to be allowed to leave slowly, the way it came.
You were putting away the evening you wore it.
Nobody holds a funeral for a season.
A season you never really lived wouldn't hurt to put away.