She sang you a song; you sat through it

A New York City summer! my New York City summer! the island is on fire! Everyone, underground, sugared over with sweat, glazed like so many donuts, tempers running high and trains running slow. I see whole days in 'opportunities for central air.' I taste beer in my mouth all the time, I taste the cool amber bottle and the flaking label. I smell lavender. I hear indie music everywhere I go, mostly Arcade Fire and lo-fi ice cream trucks and girls playing hand-games out on Franklin Avenue, out past their bedtime. My Sundays are real Sundays – no one calls, no one emails, the hours go slow, they follow the sun. I get high on Netflix and bookstores and Seamless.com; my outrageous joy in these things makes me feel nursing-home-old but also toddler-safe.

And if I ever feel empty in a day, PLANS are what fill me: if I'm drowning in my twisted bunches of wrinkly sheets (themselves sprinkled over with Nilla wafer crumbs and receipts and other things I just need around me, this my own island, could-be-crypt)... when I start days with goals like “try to understand what's so great about Radiohead” or “form opinion on the debt crisis”...when I eat and eat and eat and dream of things I will do some other day, when the sun goes down, maybe, when the leaves change, maybe... I must make a mental note to remember that this is peace. Or just as good, and nameless.

You know 'Daylight' by Matt and Kim? You remember the sun on your squinting face when you heard it live and too-fast? Baby-fist-sized art with meaning, not so much meaning, a little bit of meaning, enough to want to remember. Rattling coda: how often do other people think about the things you think about? That 'sex every seven seconds' thing, is that racket or real?

So PARTICULARLY in summer, I think. Particularly in midtown, where the humidity levels often make sidewalks feel like the inside of someone's mouth. Particularly on nighttime strolls, particularly with red lipstick on, particularly with no one demanding a product of you, particularly with time on your hands, particularly in packets of giggling and what can only be described as good, clean fun. It gets easy this way to trip down rabbit holes, to slip off horses' backs, to go ricocheting across sky or water like a flying thing or a flying thing's shadow in a lake (...what).

The season here stands in as metaphor or simile (whatever); I am using it as a cheap emotional prop. What I'm really thinking about, what I really want cyberspace to know, is just too scattered and flung to make tidy in coherent paragraphs and law-abiding sentences. So I'll just continue to spell it out: “summer” love is drunk brunch and movies with like-minded ladies, “summer” love is talking about grief and a mythic set of good-old- days with a best friend, summer love is all the things I liked and believed in during high school and elevate now, it's that music. Being in love -- in like -- in summer is thus aloft, ridiculous, devoted, nostalgic, sweet, even though it's only a boy, you're only a girl, it's only a collection of months.

Periods of time that evoke frames of mind and feeling = zany words, words like firework trails. Time is funny. Periods of rest and recuperation make me feel like life is a boomerang, with tides of going away and currents of coming home. I'm sailing away these days. I'm on a vacation from certain strains of me. I'm kidding, I'm a kid, I take the money and run, I'm under no obligation to make sense to you. And liking a distant, vague YOU in a lavender haze, on a pulpit probably better suited to revelation or review (being a pulpit and not a confessional) on that hot cloud of cause-less celebration and hours and hours and hours of nothing-something...tralalalala!, that's what I've got. That's what you've got too, I'm guessing.

COOL it, imaginary critics. Being in love (in like, in space) is only a problem, as everyone knows, when it continues into fall. Though I might fall from here. It's quite high up.