Two Summers Ago

Two Summers Ago is the period in which a work-sponsored trip to Croatia brings Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen into close quarters after their friendship has begun to recede. Its defining turn comes on the final night, when a drunken kiss exposes the intimacy they have been trying not to name; their quick agreement to call it a mistake does not restore their former ease, and silence follows them home. The period also places that rupture against a larger tension in Poppy’s life: travel can make connection feel possible, but a beautiful destination and a polished travel image cannot guarantee that she feels at home with anyone.

Place in the chronology

The chapter heading Two Summers Ago situates the Croatia episode in retrospect, after the friendship has already changed. Following Tuscany, Poppy and Alex Nilsen stepped back without explicitly discussing why: instead of texting every day, they caught up only every couple of weeks. Poppy believed that returning to their old closeness would be too easy, but not fair to Alex Nilsen or to Trey. The distance is therefore not a sudden consequence of Croatia. It is an existing condition that the trip makes harder to ignore.

During this same stretch, Poppy throws herself into work and accepts trips, sometimes one after another. At first, she and Trey seem suited to a life of constant adventure: they ride horses and camels, hike volcanoes, and jump from waterfalls. Over time, though, the endless vacation begins to feel less like freedom than flight, as if the two of them were fugitives waiting for capture. That contrast foreshadows Poppy’s later understanding that movement can distract her from loneliness without resolving it.

Travel as work and image

Poppy’s professional travel differs from the earlier trips she took with Alex Nilsen. She has built a following around budget travel and making the most of little, but her account of Sanibel Island reveals the gap between the expected beach holiday and the experience she can actually show. Across a week, she and Alex Nilsen spend only about forty minutes on the shore. They pass the rest of their time in bars, restaurants, bookstores, vintage shops, and the shabby bungalow they rent, eating popcorn and watching lightning from the sofa during a Twilight Zone marathon. There are no tans, tropical fish, snorkeling trips, or catamaran sunbathing sessions. The trip’s reality resists the beach-vacation image that an audience of roughly one hundred thousand followers expects.

That same pressure shapes Poppy’s work decisions. When she proposes Palm Springs as a destination, Swapna Bakshi-Highsmith notes that the summer is low season and that the feature would need to wait for the winter issue. Poppy argues that the season is precisely the advantage: the area is less crowded and cheaper, and the assignment could return her to her budget-travel roots. Swapna Bakshi-Highsmith’s response, that the brand is aspirational, exposes the friction between Poppy’s original practical approach and a publication’s preference for a more elevated image.

Poppy’s friendships in New York City offer another view of online self-presentation. Rachel Krohn, the first friend Poppy made after moving there, is a paid social-media influencer whose work includes photographing brands and managing accounts for dog rescues. Rachel Krohn batches a week’s photographs into a single Tuesday, changing outfits and hairstyles between locations; the arrangement lets her and Poppy treat the staging of food photographs as ordinary work rather than an embarrassment. Yet Rachel Krohn is pragmatic about the manufactured fame surrounding her. At each month’s end, she posts unedited outtakes with a disclaimer that her feed is curated imagery and that she is paid for it. Her popularity continues despite that candor. Through Rachel Krohn, the narrative distinguishes the image’s persuasive surface from the labor and performance behind it.

The Croatia trip and its pressures

Croatia is expected to be Poppy and Alex Nilsen’s best vacation yet, but the trip’s circumstances frustrate that promise. Bernard, an older R+R photographer, travels with them as the official photographer. He is a loud talker, wears a fleece vest, and repeatedly positions himself between Poppy and Alex Nilsen without noticing their exchanged looks. He has two bedrooms in their accommodation by accident; Poppy and Alex Nilsen do not correct the misunderstanding, partly because they sympathize with him. The resulting lack of privacy turns their already delicate companionship into a three-person arrangement.

The accommodations offer polished views but little comfort. Their modern apartments have white interiors, stainless-steel finishes, and balconies over the water, yet the walls are thin enough for the children upstairs to wake Poppy each morning. A dead animal behind the laundry-closet dryer produces a recurring smell; when she reports it, a teenage employee appears to address the problem, but the odor returns after the lemony scent of Lysol fades. The contrast between glittering water and these mundane irritations makes the trip’s beauty inseparable from its inconveniences. Poppy calls it both their most beautiful and their worst vacation.

Meanwhile, Alex Nilsen tells Poppy by text that he and Sarah Torval have broken up again. Their life in Linfield had seemed to affirm their relationship: they had moved there together after Alex Nilsen completed his doctorate and worked at the same school. Poppy had understood them to be happier than ever, though she allows that Alex Nilsen may have kept difficulties private. The news makes her offer of support emotionally charged. When he says it will be easier to explain in person, she feels excitement as well as apprehension, anticipating a conversation that could change their closeness.

The kiss and the aftermath

On their final night, Poppy, Alex Nilsen, and Bernard drink heavily at a restaurant overlooking the sea. They watch the sunset’s pinks and golds give way to purple darkness, then return to the resort tired and affected by the wine. Fifteen minutes after they part, Alex Nilsen knocks on Poppy’s door. His teasing suspicion that she had been getting Bernard drunk as part of a plan meets the physical closeness that has been building between the two friends. Poppy rests against him; he touches her hair and face, and their hands join before he kisses her.

The kiss begins with near-laughter, as though the moment might still be dismissed as a joke, then becomes unmistakably intimate. When Alex Nilsen pulls back, he says it should not have happened because they have both been drinking and are not thinking clearly. Poppy moves away, smooths her pajama shirt, and experiences the embarrassment as a physical blow. She quickly agrees that it was a bad idea and urges him to pretend it never happened. Her insistence that everything is fine is an attempt to protect the friendship from the possibility that the kiss has changed it, not evidence that the moment meant nothing to her.

Bernard’s return interrupts them with an unrelated story, and Poppy and Alex Nilsen barely look at each other. At home, Poppy waits for Alex Nilsen to text first, hoping that his initiative will prove they are still all right. After a week, she sends him a casual message about a funny T-shirt she saw on the subway; he replies briefly. When she checks in again two weeks later, he says he has been busy and asks whether she is okay. The exchange leaves the kiss unresolved rather than repairing their closeness. The period’s ending is thus not a declaration or a clean break, but an absence that begins to harden into distance.

Retrospective significance

Later, Poppy explains why travel once helped her feel connected. She had hated growing up in Linfield, left for Chicago when she hoped a new place would change things, and then found that travel made it easier to meet people without the weight of shared history or fear of what might happen. Chance encounters made her feel less lonely and more capable of being loved. But after taking the R+R job, her travel changed: instead of meeting people in the open-ended way she valued, she encountered chefs and hotel managers seeking coverage. The trips could be extraordinary and still leave her feeling empty.

That retrospective account clarifies the tension running through Two Summers Ago. Guillermo’s handwritten recommendations for New Orleans—restaurants, prices, and what to order—show how a friend’s local knowledge can give a work trip the texture of personal connection. Later, Poppy and Alex Nilsen’s Sweden and Norway itinerary is accompanied by weekly suggestions from Dani, whose detailed advice includes rankings of fjords by beauty, crowds, size, and access. Such planning can enrich a journey, but it cannot substitute for the human connection Poppy misses. Even the later image of Poppy and Alex Nilsen settling into everyday life in New York City—leaving a tour for Cafe Lalo, sharing cappuccinos, and balancing affection with work, dishes, and errands—sets travel’s temporary enchantment against the possibility of belonging that does not require going home when the vacation ends. The Croatia trip matters because, for a moment, Poppy and Alex Nilsen find that possibility in each other, then retreat from it.