Poppy and Alex’s annual summer trips

Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen’s annual summer trips are the durable calendar ritual of their friendship: a shared journey they can count on even as school, work, distance, and romantic uncertainty complicate the rest of their lives. Their meaning shifts over time. Early on, a trip marks Alex’s graduation and the prospect of living nearer; later, the promise of another summer together becomes both comfort and a measure of how much Poppy fears losing their closeness.

A celebration and a promise

Eight summers before the later reflections, Poppy and Alex return to their downtown hotel room at two thirty in the morning, a little drunk after a trip that has become a celebration. Alex has graduated from college and is about to leave for an MFA in creative writing at Indiana University. Poppy tells herself the separation will not be so bad: they will, in fact, live closer to each other than they have at any point since she dropped out. The trip gathers celebration and reassurance into the same moment. Alex’s next step will take him away, but the friendship has survived greater distance before, and their shared time offers a reason to expect that it will continue.

The summer journey is not merely an occasional pleasure but a recurring commitment. When Alex jokes that, whatever else changes, they will always have the Summer Trip, Poppy has to make an effort to receive the thought as comforting. That effort matters: the ritual promises continuity, but it also makes visible her fear that their time together may be limited to one dependable visit a year. Its reassurance is real, yet not uncomplicated.

Distance and the next meeting

During a later trip to New Orleans, Poppy weighs her affection for New York against the possibility that she could be just as happy, or happier, elsewhere. She wonders whether Alex might visit more often if she lived there. Her question grows from the practical shape of their friendship: although she has been in New York for five months, Alex has visited only once, a few weeks after finishing his first year of graduate school. He brought a carload of her belongings from her parents’ house to her apartment in Brooklyn, and they used the final day of his visit to compare calendars and discuss when they might meet again.

The options underline how much depends on the summer trip. They expect to see each other for it; Thanksgiving seems possible but unlikely, and Christmas is difficult because Poppy works at a restaurant where everyone wants time off. She suggests New Year’s Eve instead, and they agree to work out the details later. On the New Orleans trip itself, neither wants to spend their time together dwelling on the next separation. Alex’s joke about always having the Summer Trip offers a neat answer to that uncertainty, but Poppy’s need to decide consciously that it is reassuring shows the cost of treating one annual visit as a guarantee.

Intimacy and boundaries

The tradition also sits within a friendship whose closeness is difficult to describe as wholly uncomplicated. Poppy recognizes that she would struggle to believe such a friendship was entirely platonic if she were Alex’s girlfriend. She privately allows for a small but persistent possibility that the two friends could have been something more. When Alex asks what they should do, Poppy suggests inviting his girlfriend; after a pause, he says he does not think that is a good idea. The exchange makes the trip’s intimacy consequential: the space they share is not simply a neutral holiday setting but part of a relationship that can be hard for an outsider to interpret.

This tension does not erase the friendship’s established form. Instead, it makes the annual meeting carry more than one kind of expectation. For Poppy, the trip preserves time with Alex while leaving the larger question of their relationship unresolved. The yearly promise can steady her, but it cannot tell her what their closeness means or whether their time together will ever become more frequent.

Work travel and the ritual’s changing shape

As Poppy’s career sends her around the world, the summer tradition continues in a changed form. She pitches combining the trip with a work assignment, while privately looking forward to Alex’s reaction when they arrive at a resort with their ratty T.J. Maxx luggage and are greeted with champagne. The contrast between their worn bags and the resort welcome lets her imagine his surprise; it also marks how unlike their earlier trips this arrangement may be. The itinerary includes four days in Sweden and four in Norway, part of a journey in which professional travel and time together overlap rather than remain separate.

Poppy’s greater access to travel does not make the shared trip dispensable. She becomes nervous that Alex might cancel and tells him so. He reassures her that the Summer Trip is the highlight of his year; she says it is hers too. When he asks whether she is tired of traveling now that she gets to do it so often, the question draws out a distinction between travel as her work and this particular journey as time with him. The tradition matters not because every trip resembles the ones they took before, but because, even as its setting and circumstances change, both friends continue to name it as something they want to keep.