august and cardigan represent two competing and incompatible visions of ownership. august centers around a narrative that the narrator doesn’t have the ownership that she thought she had over James. She says this very directly: “You were never mine”. Betty, by contrast, seems to have a much more solid sense of her ownership of James: “I knew you’d come back to me”.
There’s a question in my head over whether you can ever really own a person in any meaningful sense. You can spend a lifetime with them, and they can leave you on your deathbed. Their love is only ever on loan; it can be withdrawn at any moment, with no notice, and no justification. To love and be loved has an inherent vulnerability, knowing that you’re opening yourself up to heartbreak and loss, and that you will become, on some level, dependant on another’s whims.
But there’s also a certain romanticism over making yourself someone else’s, and believing that they are yours. It’s another aspect of august‘s naïve hope, and therefore its beauty: that the narrator was able to believe that she had James.
Maybe she did have him, in a sense. Even if a person departs, they can take themselves, but they can never take the part of themselves that lives within you. The narrator has marked, and been marked by, James. There’s no such thing as a meaningless relationship – even if the relationship was, as James says in betty, “just a summer fling”, a relationship between two humans carries inherent meaning. The meaning may be different for the two of them, but it’s still there. A brief encounter can still carry huge significance – time makes no impediment on the ability of two people to mark each other.