July. Enigmatic, elusive, and hot. Ephemeral, yet endless.

The month of cherry pits under your tongue and all the poetry of their cyanide, just begging to be written.

The seventh month. The month of fireflies and sticky skin, of bright, yellow, scalding light and hours that never end. The point in time in which the sun is the farthest away from the earth that it will be all year. The one that turns the year into one that is already nearly, somehow, almost over. And, the month in which I was born.

The air is warm and breezy, high 70s. It is about 8pm and something pulls me outside. Fresh out of the shower with no makeup, I throw my hair up into a bun, slip on a dress, and venture out. When I was growing up in California, I used to do that every night. After long days of school and sports and homework, I would walk during the golden hour, the only free time I had, up and down the streets as the golden light drained from them and every palm tree turned to a black silhouette against a purple sky.

STAY THIS WAY

I felt close to those memories as I strolled through Brooklyn tonight. Looking up, I thought of the week of teaching I just did and how kids give you so much perspective on life without even knowing it. I thought of my fifth graders and how sweet and bold and unique they are. They are just moments away from turning into the awkward, uncomfortable, and no-longer-willing-to-participate 6th graders, and there is something special about that. There was one student in particular who was so cool and spunky and all I could think was—Stay. Stay this way. And if you must stray, I hope you always come back.

I have found that your twenties are the years of learning to come back.

Back from the war that was adolescence and home to who you were. To who you are. Sometimes I find myself dancing in the kitchen or listening to music while stretched out on the floor and I find her. My younger self. My inner child. The one I tried to run so far away from as a teenager, desperate to gain the respect of the world. At fourteen, you think that the only way to do that is to shut that kid away in the other room and act like you don’t still sometimes want to open the door again. Feel the texture of the light that dances in that room again, the light that just hasn’t been the same ever since. So warm and sweet and full of something that you think might have been love.

I found that love in the light again tonight.

SOMETHING INCOMMUNICABLE

I felt that feeling, the one that comes over you when you are outside, standing under a pale blue sky, watching it’s changing colors drip down through the trees and onto the sidewalks, pooling at your feet before trickling down the drain as the world grown dark, devoid of hue. The streets grow hazy and surreal, buildings exhaling for the day into a somehow more relaxed posture. Trees gently whispering as they catch those ephemeral drops of gold and pink sunlight. I looked around, tilting my head to one side, and thought—how do you ever describe this.

I thought of some favorite lines:

“A journal is an experiment in consciousness. An attempt to record not just the external world, and not just the vagrant, fugitive, ephemeral “thoughts” that brush against us like gnats, but the refractory and inviolable authenticity of daily life: daily-ness, day-ness, day-lightness, the day’s eye of experience.”

– The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.”

– Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

I walked for endless blocks, past bars and restaurants as the cacophony of clinking glasses and forks on plates filled the air. Past friends gathered out on their stoops, one on each step, laughing. I walked under string lights and through low hanging branches, right into a neighbor. He stopped to talk, to say hello. Beautiful night. It really is. And I thought how strange that someone knows me, that Brooklyn is beginning to know me. The illusion of invisibility shattered at my feet.

A block or two later, a man stopped to ask me for the time. The time. 8:24, I told him. Thank you, have a wonderful night. He ran off like the rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date!

You too, I shouted. For a moment, I felt as if we were in another era, an era where smartphones aren’t extensions of our own bodies and people still stop to ask for the time. Again, invisibility shattered.

THE TASTE OF A MEMORY

I walked on, snapping blurry photos as I went, eager to see later how they would turn out. At some point, I stopped for a bag of M&Ms at a bodega, feeling the story behind them sitting in my bones.

One of my earliest and favorite memories of New York is sitting on a hotel bed eating M&Ms with my mom. We had gone to the famous M&M factory in Times Square where you can get them custom made. Ours were lavender and blue and white, I think, and they were the best we had ever had. Then again, most things taste like that after a long day of running around NYC. Even still, I often crave those little chocolate gems when I am here. This was actually the first time I have stopped for some. They weren’t as good as I remember, but they made me smile. They held the taste of a memory.

I placed the colorful candies in my palm as I walked. Fireflies began to dance around me as the world grew dark and TV screens lit up in windows. People walked with ice cream cones, bars began to fill up, and fireworks echoed somewhere in the distance. Here, summer is summer like I have never seen.

I climbed the stoop to my apartment and eagerly looked to see if any photos turned out. There is nothing better than randomly snapping shots only to later find that one or two perfectly encapsulated the sensation of that scene. Tonight there were two. One of canary yellow sunflowers against a corner-lot Brownstone, and one of a Chinese food sign, also canary yellow, contrasted with a dark blue sky. I love them. I love the moments of my life that they tell the story of.

The story of me, at the very end of 21, walking through Brooklyn on a warm night in July, finding something in the air, in that gentle breeze that blows hair into your eyes, that has followed me all the way from California.

Something utterly ineffable.

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