A Feeling Called June

By Esha Aphale ( Instagram : @eshalikestowrite and @esha.aphale )

Picture Credit: Tanya Kulkarni

June, for the past sixteen years, always felt like thirty Wednesdays strung together. One after the other; Wednesday after Wednesday. To me, June always felt unneeded. Basically, like the Wednesday of a week. Not as soul-sucking as a Monday morning or as exciting as a Friday night or a lazy as a Sunday afternoon. June was always just there, that weird juxtaposition between the end of summer and start of monsoon where no one knew the exact name of the emotion they felt. I always associated June with buying lychees and feeling a little lost. 

June, to others, means so many different things. For some, it’s the celebration of their existence, and for others, it’s the mourning of someone’s death. To some, June is all about beaches and tan and summer. While to some, it’s the arrival of rain, hand in hand with seasonal depression. For a few, it’s the most hated month with feelings of indifference because it indicates the reopening of school, and the end of summer. Some see June as full of vibrant colors, happiness, and impulsive decisions, while for others, its greying, fading, colors inside a square box. It’s funny and electrifying how something as simple as a thirty day month, having the same twenty-four hour days, with sunrise and sunset can mean so many different things to so many different people. 

Albeit the fact that June has always felt odd to me, Bombay’s Junes are something of the candescent legends. There’s this different magic in the air sitting at your balcony eating the last few mangoes, which make your face scrunch up because they are neither sweet or sour, and feeling the onset of rain. Getting wet during the first downpour, falling ill and then staying at home eating copious amounts of Maggi and drinking coffee.

June feels weird because there are people out there stuck in school, rote learning the table of seventeen, while I’m wrapped up in my blanket with a huge suitcase tucked in a tiny corner of my room waiting to go on vacation. My friends are away at summer school, forging new friendships and deciding their future universities. Few of them are practicing adulthood and interning, discovering their calling. Some are on vacation, taking a break and discovering themselves. It’s that feeling of realizing that every single person, living, breathing, unborn or dead have or at least had a whole life that I’ll never ever be aware of. I associate June with that realization. 

June may not be as refreshing as January, or as lovestruck as February, or as rusty as March, or as joyful as April— but it has an unknowing beauty in itself. The beauty of the goddess it was named after, holding the same excitement and fear of the legends surrounding her. I realized that Juno is the personification of June, not only its namesake. She was warlike but also gentle, just like the floods of destruction and rains of pleasure that June brings.

But there’s something about June, amidst the summer weddings and humidity and partial sunshine, that always makes me feel a sense of wonder. Who knows maybe June will surprise us all soon?