the sweetness of summer

on simply existing

This summer, similar to lots of my summers before, I find that I don’t have much to say.

This season, for me, has always felt like this weird liminal space—romantic and heady but full of haze and unfinished thoughts. Everything gets lost to the humidity.

Sure, I’m busy, in the same way that every twenty-something who spends most hours of her life in New York is—I go to dinners, and luncheons, panels, concerts, galas that I’m lucky enough to just afford entry to. I laugh on the swings with my boyfriend at the pier; I swipe the sweat from my forehead before stepping into Three Lives & Company; I leave lipstick stains on a sweating martini glass outside a restaurant I can barely afford; I swipe my hair off my neck and get drunk with my friends and make wishes.

And I write essays piecemeal. Lose steam with one, start another, and the process goes on.

I edit my novel at night with a half glass of white wine that’s fully warm by time I’m deep enough in the pages to need it. Saturday evenings I watch my boyfriend make us dinner, hair dripping and skin salty from our hours of late afternoon swimming. On Sunday mornings, we have coffee together and then he goes home and I find myself at my desk, or maybe on my deck, tinkering with something new.

This is the only time of year I don’t believe in pressure. I don’t want to feel it. The sun high in the sky is hot enough, the damp air in my chest is all the heaviness I can bear. So I read—a lot. I devour books on desire, read poetry on the beach, dip back into Woolf’s The Waves while dipping bread into olive oil under the awning of Morandi like I’ve done the last three summers. (And like the last three summers, I’ll pull myself from Woolf’s shimmering sea before I reach the end.)

Maybe, for me, the summer is for returning. Rounding back to seasonal habits, like painting my nails Russian Roulette by Essie, wearing my waves, long and soft, down my back, finding quick refuge from the heat in the Crate & Barrel on Broadway, sharing a pitcher of sangria with Michael in Little Italy, meeting friends for coffee in poorly ventilated cafes, pulling back the rug and laying on the cool tile of my kitchen floor, my dog at my feet licking the sweat from my calf.

I’ll wear the same bikini for the entire summer despite buying ten new ones. I’ll keep trying Aperol Spritzs until I like them. I’ll eat oysters at the same spot on main street I do every summer. I’ll kiss the same boy I’ve been kissing for the last nine years, but it will feel different and more, the way it does every June, July, and August because being that close when it’s this hot is a choice.

I’ll miss the outdoor showers of my youth. I’ll miss eating watermelon until our bellies were distended and rolling around in the grass until we’d ‘properly digested’ and could swim again. I’ll miss playing colors, and categories, and marco polo, and mermaids. I’ll miss dumping buckets of water down the ancient white slide at my grandmother’s pool, a necessity if you didn’t want it to rip the skin off your back when you slid down, before sliding down head first.

I know I’ll relay all of the stories of summer’s past the way I do every year to Michael over a glass of wine in the big white chairs that sit against the water. We’ll watch the ferry go to Fire Island and back and laugh over memories we’ve already shared the year before, and before, and before. My feet in his lap, his thumb brushing the bone of my ankle.

He’ll wipe marshmallow from my chin while I eat my seventh s’more of the night and I’ll wince, rubbing aloe into the red of my skin before bed.

I won’t think as much, ruminate on all the bad because—how can I? When the air smells like the sea and there’s sweat behind my ears and the freckles on my nose have come back.

I’d never want it to be endless. I’m not built for long-term heat and I’d miss the frenzy that is feeling like I’m never writing enough. For these three months, though, I’m perfectly content with blank pages, blinking cursors, and sentences with no real end. I’m okay with abandoning my laptop for mojitos in tall glasses and grilled eggplant soaked in balsamic and poorly played games of tennis and bars in SoHo that don’t believe in paying for air conditioning and jumping from the deck into the pool and having handstand contests at the age of twenty-five. I’d abandon anything, just to feel this way a little bit longer. To soak up all of this season I can get.

For the whole summer, for every summer, I will rinse and repeat.