New York is Fast. Should Summer Have to Keep Up?
In New York, we are meant to bend time to fit in everything that we chase throughout the city. Happy hours cover the gap we would otherwise spend in front of our pantry, humming and hawing about what to make for dinner. Gym memberships and book clubs and poetry readings jumble around your schedule in alternating fashion, dependent on if you broke through the waitlist or instead nabbed a reservation at the latest trendingsmallplatesLatinAsianfusionspot before 9 p.m. Dates start with dinner, proceed to stopping by a private event, getting carried away with whatever friend you made there and following them to a bar around the corner, and dipping back to yours or theirs (if they’re lucky)… maybe even breakfast in the morning (if you’re lucky). This is likely a weekly occurrence, though most people prefer to pass it off as a particularly “crazy week” and hope that one day the sheer volume will magically turn down at least three notches.
I was born and bred to go, go, go — except for at least one day of the week where I need to lie around, making up for the lack of laying around all the other days. However, three years in England and travels across mainland Europe provided enough exposure to ennui that the word that passes my lips and sits at my core is leisure. I haven’t found a direct match to the overgrown grasses of Hampstead Heath in London, or the piazza viewpoints in Florence, or the evening lingerers in Montmartre. There are many things I have longed for that New York is the salve, but leisure is not baked in to cities that never sleep.
The whole point of the city is that you can’t escape. The noise, the people, yourself. When I sit down on the park bench to meet Julia in Fort Greene, my elbow brushes down onto the shoulder of the girl on the next bench over. Somehow, I don’t hear their conversation the entire time we are seated beside each other. Julia is just small enough to fold her legs up onto the bench; I have a length that is most relaxed when sprawled. We study small rescue dogs with freakish bent tails and where we have gone right or wrong with our education, self- esteem, and independence. Despite evidence to prove otherwise, we fear we’ve missed our chance at love.
At coffee (technically matcha - when will we start saying ‘at matcha’?), someone I’ve just met tells me there’s a triangle – no, a square – of elements that make up our lives in the city: love, work, apartment, and friends. You can only fare well in two of the four at a time. I got laid off just last week, achieved my first-year goal of making five reliable friends in the city, and am in a rare budding romantic period. Most of the time, I also happen to like my apartment, despite all of the G train’s dastardly attempts to smite me and the one guy blasting exclusively “I Have Nothing” or “I Will Always Love You” at random once a week or so. It could be a neighbor, or a driver, or cyclist, but it’s most certainly a man playing Whitney’s ballads at the neighborhood.
By these metrics, I should count my blessings. Instead, I joke that the only way to achieve all four is to leave New York, which is probably why Brooklynites move upstate to hike & own a farm-to-table restaurant or wine bar. At least then, they’ll be able to enjoy summer the way they’re supposed to.
My lips suckle on strawberries, only as big as a wet kiss, I write. Like that from your grandma when you were five, or after a good date drunk in the summer streets. The pavement emanates a glorious stench and he will call you first thing tomorrow.
Growing up, my parents would stop at Russell’s Farm five minutes down the road and cop a few baskets of Michigan’s finest strawberries. They were a single bite’s worth, but if you savored them by treating it like biting ice cream – using your teeth and mouth, accepting the softness – you could make it last at least three. “You didn’t even taste it,” my family teases each other when one person wharfs down their meal. Summer strawberries deserve better than that. It’s like my older sister’s strategy as a toddler at the U-Pick blueberry farm: almost mumbling to herself one for the bucket, three for me, as she would move down the line of bushes.
Everyone in New York leaves the concrete heat, at least for a little while. It reminds me of college spring break: fellow classmates went to Ft Lauderdale or Seaside or Gulf Shores, and I did my best to be content watching movies with my parents or extra shifts of a part time job as the snow begrudgingly melted back in Michigan. With the release of Tom Lake, many of my new friends have concocted poetic daydreams of the summers I know best. My summer rituals have often been centered around an ice cream or gelato shop, strolling through a park or blaring downloaded music from rolled windows as the orange sun paints over cornfields and roadkill. There’s a good chance that for the five days I’m home in July, I’ll find an opportunity to swim in the lake and pick up an ice cream cone that doesn’t cost $9 on the way home. I’ll sit on the back porch, sipping on an ale as the wind chimes clink together in a familiar duet with the trickling brook I used to take a raft down with my best friend. I’ve grown fond of watching the water crawl past the rewilded bank that teems with native grasses and flowers, their resilience a direct result of eschewing any form of maintenance.
Sydney gives me the phone number of her astrologist after we both discuss at what point we think we’re at in our Saturn returns. I tell my best friend from college about a date I had over the weekend to get her thoughts – a fellow stubborn, practical earth sign — and she replies well, Venus is in Taurus today so romance is in the air. Every woman I know is spiritual no matter if they belong to a specific religion or not, and summertime is the exact right moment to pay attention to how the phases of the moon and the planetary movements affect us. Leaving Sheep Meadow yesterday, I’m passed by an effeminate man telling whoever is on the other side of the line that they surmise “it must be a full moon or something” because “all of these crazy people are trying to bring cases to the firm at the same time”. The strawberry moon was last night, I want to call out.
I find myself with a taste for the hedonistic whenever I am reminded that despite all we try, humans are but a speck of dust. We hold immense consequence, and yet there is a high chance I leave this earth having achieved nothing of worth past a few generations. Might as well find something to enjoy! Herein lies the dichotomy that directly reflects this place and this season. New York is for chasing, acquiring, achieving. Summer asks us instead to linger, sway, let time get away from us.
My friend’s mom uses the term ‘fast’ to refer to girls who acted grown up before they were meant to, not knowing the repercussions it would bring them in relation to the girl-woman severance or as prey to the ‘real world’. To my parent’s friends, I was deemed an old soul, but there was no other way because I never understood how to live fast. It was a formula hidden behind curtains that I either didn’t have the password to or couldn’t identify if it rested underneath my nose. It’s not as simple as saying ‘yes’ to things or becoming the most restless, spontaneous version of yourself; if that were the case, I would have been a lot cooler in high school and would be reliving it every day since. Fast is a short-lived fantasy; how are you meant to go on when it runs out?
In winter I write poetry about losing my mind, or being concerned about the possibility of losing my mind. In summer, my poems center around right now: salt burning my eyes after an evening swim, passing a bottle of warm water back and forth with someone lovely in bed, dancing around the stew creeping out from the city’s gutters, the haze that settles into someone’s skin and unwinds their inhibitions from the inside out. Summer is the season that leaves you the quickest, coolly wriggling past your attempts to claw and cling onto it. So why bother tracking its progress? The serendipity of summer comes by chance if you let it.
New York has the unique opportunity to host the sprinters and the dawdlers in each hand. When many have to disappear from the premises to find a way to relax, what does it mean to remain? Maybe you can’t find a moment totally to yourself, but the connectivity pulsing through the concrete and affecting humid days or buzzy evenings is one-of-one. Somehow, surrounded by public proposals and rented yachts blasting various Bad Bunny songs, peace drifts down from the pink and purple skies and washes up at my feet by the waterfront in Dumbo. I wonder if knowing you can’t avoid New York is exactly what you need to control your tempo as you carry on through it.
When I leave his apartment, the glow of the morning and the weightlessness of my nerve endings point my feet toward Central Park. I see my own smile in every cyclist I pass, the dog walkers, one man fishing and the fit elderly woman stretching on the bridge above the waterfall. I could not be shuffling any more than I am at this moment, I think to myself. It’s hard to understand why everyone here gets so swamped with scheduled plans… the best days are the ones where a clock doesn’t tick. Opportunists rejoice in New York, but they should also learn to say no on a more frequent basis. Slowing down brings deep satisfaction, not a nagging sense of loss. I choose to melt into the swell.
Ryann Stutz is a writer and marketing specialist based in Brooklyn obsessing over good omens in the form of Dalmatians, her memorable stint living in London, and Audrey Hepburn’s Givenchy pillbox hats in Charade. Her Substack, And I’ve Been Saying That!, interrogates the existing world order as it relates to fashion, politics and culture.
Instagram: @ryannstutz