The Summer That Wasn’t.

By 2025, the world had moved on.

The pandemic—that first one—was five years in the rearview. We’d mourned. We’d adjusted. We’d come back.

Weddings returned. School plays resumed. People started planning ahead like nothing could touch us anymore. Even the cautious ones started leaving their hand sanitizer at home. The collective trauma of 2020 became something we laughed about in group chats or used as a timestamp: “That was back during peak-pandemic, remember?”

Then came the summer of Veil.

No one knew why it was called that. Maybe because it didn’t show up on tests at first. Or maybe because once it hit, it blurred things—not in a physical way, but in your mind.

You’d wake up and swear it was Thursday when it was Monday. You’d see your reflection wink at you. You’d look at your best friend and suddenly not be able to recall how you met.

They didn’t even issue an emergency broadcast this time. Just a quiet advisory:

“If you’re feeling unwell, stay indoors. If reality feels off, do not panic.”

It sounded like a joke.

By June, things still looked normal—but they felt wrong. Like the world had been copied and pasted slightly crooked. My neighbor watered fake plants every morning. The grocery store near my house had the same song on repeat for five days before anyone noticed. Street signs spelled things slightly wrong: Reynolds became Rynolds. Oakwood was suddenly Oakwool.

And then there were the memories…

Maya called me crying. She said she remembered coming to visit last week—but she hadn’t. I checked my phone, and there were photos. Us in front of the beach mural downtown. Her holding the same iced coffee I was drinking in that moment. But I never saw her. I know I never saw her.

I stopped trusting my photos after that. I stopped trusting my own hands.

We were supposed to have the whole summer. Backyard dinners. Road trips. Long, humid nights talking about nothing and everything. We had plans. I had proof of them.

But something about Veil made it all slippery.

People described the sensation like déjà vu laced with vertigo. You’d be laughing one moment, and then suddenly forget who you were laughing with. Or why. Or if it even happened.

Some called it a hallucination virus. Others said it was a breakdown in the collective psyche. But all I know is this: I stopped being sure of what was real.

We didn’t panic the way we did in 2020. No shutdowns. No curfews. Just a quiet exodus into private spaces. People kept to themselves. Businesses paused operations without really explaining why. The world dimmed, but didn’t turn off.

The most frightening thing wasn’t being sick. It was never knowing if you were.

Because how do you measure an illness that erases your own awareness of having it?

I started keeping a notebook. Writing down what I saw, what I felt, who I talked to. But even that felt unreliable. Some days, the handwriting didn’t look like mine. One day it read, “Do not trust the girl in the lavender dress. She is not who she says she is.” I lived alone.

The worst part was that this was the summer we were supposed to live fully again. We were supposed to thrive. We had a real chance to be reckless in the best possible way—joyful, open, unafraid.

And maybe we were, for a little while. But if we were, the virus took that from us too.

Because now I can’t tell if that memory of dancing barefoot under the string lights was real, or a fever dream. If that last perfect night at the lake even happened, or if my brain stitched it together from old Instagram stories and candle smoke.

Maya and I don’t talk much anymore. She doesn’t remember calling me. She’s not sure she ever had a plane ticket here at all.

People are recovering, apparently. Or adapting. Whatever recovery means in a world where every fact has an asterisk. But something changed. The world came back from this one a little grayer, a little quieter.

And as for me?

Sometimes I stand in my backyard, still turning on those same fairy lights. I don’t know if I’ve done it for a hundred nights or three. I just know it matters. I know I keep doing it to anchor something.

Because I want to believe that summer was real.

That we did have it back.

That for a few brilliant weeks, we danced and kissed and laughed and got sunburnt, and thought, This is what life is supposed to feel like.

And maybe it was.

Maybe that’s the great cruelty of Veil: it didn’t take the summer. It just made us forget how to hold it.

And now, all I have are fragments.

Half-lit memories.

Echoes.

And this soft, aching question that never quite goes away:

Did we ever really have it back at all?