Easy glow

two years

Happy almost summer. Here’s an essay celebrating two years since I moved to New York. And a playlist to go with it:

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There are privet trees flowering all over the city. I mistook their smell for jasmine. I’ve been trying and failing to learn more trees. I wanted it to be jasmine because I wanted that scent—one I wear on my neck and wrists—replicated in the world. The city does this. I’m convinced it’s one thing, then with a closer look, it’s something else entirely. This morning, as I passed under another canopy of fragrance, I worried I was getting tired of the smell.

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I go with you while you’re working because we’ve been apart for ten days. Stuck in the car all day, but we don’t care. A shock of bliss. You make me laugh until I have to hide my face behind the book I leant you. At every stoplight, you kiss me. I missed the sound of your voice as you answer my questions. Through New Jersey, over bridges and small towns, whose names I will not know, miles away, but the only thing I feel is at home.

Finally back in Brooklyn, the sky rapidly takes on the color of a bruise. Like the one fading on my thigh. Orange ring around a splotch of gray. I remember how much a cliche it is to liken the sky to that metaphor. We roll down the windows before the rain. I stick my head out and close my eyes. It smells like it did the summer I lived in my college town, eight years ago. My friend drove us around as we moved our other friend from one sublet to another. The sky cracked open. We got to the house safely, watched the downpour from the porch. I didn’t know it then, but you were only a block away. I probably walked past your house every day.

Now we’re stuck under the overpass. Terrible traffic when the rain finally arrives. It pelts the windshield. We get through the standstill and downpour, then park for a while before our final errand. After waiting so many days, we wait again for time to take us forward, relieving us from longing. 

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I moved here two years ago on the heels of heartbreak. Into the eye of a changing storm that was my late twenties. I couldn’t get enough of the city. I tried everything at least once. Dating, bars, neighborhoods, friends. Preferences adopted quickly and were dropped just as fast. New places I thought were cool until their emptiness was otherwise revealed. My favorite train dependent on which didn’t force me to wait in the underground sauna of the subway. What I could consider casual held against the metric of what felt too fast, too soon. 

The first time I’d visit my future neighborhood, I walked there for a date. And then again. The second time my date had me over for dinner. Beautiful tomato salad peppered with fennel seeds I bought from an East Village spice store. I carried them with me in a jar all day. We sweat in the kitchen, talking faster than thoughts formed. I was so hungry from the heat I almost ate the tomatoes with my hands. I contained myself, the way I contained myself any time something like feeling threatened my stray dog freedom.

I grew younger over the course of a summer, then old again. I settled into something like the beginning of the rest of my life. 

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My second summer was a wash. There was a day the sky turned orange with wildfire smoke. I believed it was a day I would always remember, but now all I remember is the car I took out of the city, glad to leave behind—even for a weekend—everything that was hurting me. At last I could admit it, but it would take another month before I did anything to change it.

There was a night I pulled a branch of honeysuckle on my way to see a friend. I gave it to him, a peace offering, although I had nothing to apologize for. He told me it was the only good thing left in the world. 

Another night I got caught in the rain on my way to see someone. At the time, I thought it was romantic. To show up on his doorstep in drenched clothes. The glue on my shoe soles disintegrated. He only offered me a change of clothes when I asked. A week later, it was finally over.

That week I walked around Clinton Hill during the annual heatwave. I made promises to myself. That even if I could avoid heartbreak from here on, I wouldn’t choose the safer bet. I needed to be stronger but I also needed to stay soft as I had ever been. If I wanted someone again, they needed to know it too soon rather than too late. To stop forcing myself into the wrong places. I watched as the wind moved through ivy spackling the side of an apartment. I wanted to be moved like that.

Suddenly it was August at the end of the dog days. My friend was in town for only a few days so I showed up at a bar drenched in sweat after biking from Fort Greene to Bushwick. We were both exhausted and sunburned but the night was far from over. Once I cooled off, I caught a ride with new-old friends to a club. You were driving. Two months later, I would be on my way to falling in love. Summer when I had no idea that I had been in the right place at the right time. 

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Every summer is perfect even when it’s not. It was summer when I first met my best friends. It was summer when I saw you again. Summer when I first understood it’s been luck all along, not some great cosmic plan. Summer when I learned to savor. The time between departures and returns. Touching. Sex in the afternoon and late in the night. I savor the stupid rituals. Sitting in front of the AC unit in my underwear eating frozen mangoes. Early morning runs ending with bodega coffee and kids’ cereal. Until it’s gone, under my tongue, holding on as long as possible.

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One Sunday afternoon I’d been wrung out from crying. The night after so much. I’d been dealt a half-hearted rejection from someone I’d started to like. I’d tried ketamine for the first time. I got off the phone with a friend who was grieving a parent. I was grieving the end of my relationship.

I walked around the neighborhood wondering if I’d made the right choice to move here. I’d been living here for less than a month. The heatwave made everywhere unbearable. Indoors or outdoors, there was no relief.

As if out of a mirage, I saw two little girls selling lemonade on their stoop. I overpaid for a cup, which was garnished with mint from their mother’s planter. The drink was so sweet it coated my tongue. Somehow I was thirstier. I’ve written about this moment before, and how later I told a would-be lover the story and he told me I should write a novel someday. I didn’t believe him.

Then again, I didn’t believe in anything at the time. I didn’t believe in individual moments as a future collection I could make sense of. I didn’t believe in all that could happen in two years. Now I am finding it hard to find something I don’t believe in.

News from Home, dir. Chantal Akerman (1977)