Summer in New York has been 9pm walks through the golden light as fireflies flicker around my feet.

It’s been reading on the stoop under Brooklyn’s rustling canopy of London Plane trees, and Fourth of July in Connecticut, watching the fireworks explode over the water, our toes stuck in the still-warm sand. Iced coffee and people watching. Kayaking on the Long Island Sound. The smell of fish and chips mingling with the ocean air. Late dinners on long tables in the yard.

It’s been lazy twilight rendezvous spent swatting at bugs and marveling at the way the sun sends red cherries and burnt oranges tumbling down the horizon. You want to hold out your arms and catch them all. You want time to slow down so that you can.

It’s been letting my hair grow long and wild and watching mid-summer thunderstorms from the stoop. It’s been birthdays and anniversaries and long walks home through the sunken light of New York, still tipsy from dinner and with gelato in hand.

It’s been turning 23 in some little French restaurant in Brooklyn, sharing champagne and sardine toast with your favorite person, wondering how you got there.

How did I get here? The last thing I remember, I was 21, getting on a plane and laughing because I didn’t have a job, nor did I know a single soul in this entire universe of a city. How strange for these things to not be true anymore.

I waited a long time to be this happy.

They tell you when you are a teenager that you can’t think of anyone but yourself. That your brain simply hasn’t yet developed the capacity to truly care about anyone else. You don’t really know what that means, and you don’t really care either because, as it turns out, they weren’t entirely wrong.

It hasn’t been until these recent years that I have returned to that idea, turning it over and over like a smooth stone in my palm.

For a long time, I thought that the point of life was walking alone through the East Village with a camera and nowhere to be. Great books and better essays. Learning interesting things to bring up at extravagant dinner parties I just hadn’t been invited to yet.

I am learning now that these were not wrong answers, just incomplete ones. It turns out that it really isn’t about this apartment or that job or even about this city. It’s about who you love and who loves you. The singular point from which all true happiness is derived might really be the age-old cliché of love after all.

For when I think of 22, surely it was solo rendezvous and new recipes and reading in coffee shops. I love to be alone. But really, it was intimate dinners in Italian restaurants and sharing a bottle of wine on the roof, and taking the train out to Connecticut for long weekends that I remember most.

It was driving around and seeing the charming house where someone I love grew up, thinking of how incredibly far it was from the one where I did, and how improbable it was for us to meet at all.

It was the way it felt to watch my story cease to be just my own anymore, and how that changes everything, from daily life to the absolute infrequency of what used to be a rigid blogging schedule.

When I feel bad for not sharing as much here as I used to, I think of, as one does, a poem by Joy Sullivan about tomatoes.

“I waited so long for love
and suddenly, here it is
standing in the garden, hands full
of heirlooms hot from the sun.

Soon we’ll make a supper of them.
Salted slabs between slices of bread.
Your beard silvers. My hips ripen.
The mail piles up.

Phone calls go unanswered. Forgive us.
Our mouths are full of tomatoes.
We are so busy
being small and hungry and alive.”

– JOY SULLIVAN

When I was younger, I loved Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. Patti Smith’s “M-Train” was nearly biblical to me in high school because, evidently, I related more to a rocker poet in her 70s, drinking black coffee in New York and melancholically musing on life than I did to parties or having friends.

But now I love Joy Sullivan. Mary Oliver. Kurt Vonnegut and why he refused to keep envelopes in the house. I feel softer than I did then. I want to stand in the garden with my arms full of tomatoes, ignoring the phone and all the writing drafts waiting to be published because none of the things that mattered then matter anymore. And thank god.

I think too of a quote from Martha Graham that I found while indulgently drowning in the depths of Maria Popova’s never-ending rabbit hole of a brainchild, The Marginalian. (An intoxicatingly brainy blog I have been reading since my high school English teacher first made me aware of its existence.)

There, Graham’s quote reads:

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.

And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.”

I read this and think of all the drafts I have saved, drafts that probably won’t ever be published because I don’t think they are good enough. Truthfully, I have not found most of what I have written since moving to New York good enough.

Not because I am not inspired, but because I am so busy living instead. My mouth is so full of tomatoes, as Sullivan might say, that I can’t bring myself to leave the sun and go inside and write about how they taste.

I just want to keep tasting them.

And when I do find myself putting it all into prose, I find it mushy and soft and not at all as good as what I wrote when I was less happy. Great art is usually the product of great suffering for a reason. But I am no Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath. I have no interest in misery for the sake of art, not anymore. I am older than 17, and the world has become an extraordinarily different place.

I don’t solely find meaning in writing anymore. It’s hanging from the London Plane trees and climbing the fire escapes and flickering somewhere behind the eyes of those I love. It’s everywhere, now.

And so the words of Graham resonate deeply. They remind me that it’s not my job to withhold writing or not because I deem what I have to say as interesting or not. Of value or not. It’s worth it to put some piece of yourself out into the world, if only so that it is there. If only so that it exists. It will make you feel like you do, too. Whether it be a cake, a child, or an essay.

So no, I don’t quite yearn for some insane writing career anymore. New York has taught me that. I just want to notice things about the world and write about them and be happy.

I do sometimes wonder if that kid who wanted to move to this city and be the next Joan Didion would ever forgive me for growing soft in the face of love. I wonder if she would kill me for wanting to move to a house in Connecticut with a white picket fence to raise babies and bake birthday cakes and water the hydrangeas instead of running around in heels to some high-power career.

But the thing is, I wanted this life before I wanted that one. I wanted Frank Sinatra floating through the hallways and onions sautéing on the stove and the bare feet of those I love dancing on hardwood floors before I wanted anything.

Most days, longing for or wondering about that other life feels meaningless in the light of what I have found instead.

In her book “Tiny Beautiful Things”, Cheryl Strayed has an essay titled “The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us”, with a conclusion that reads:

“I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

I remember underlining this passage with a red pen when I first read it at 16, and I am underlining it still. I don’t wish for that other life, but I do salute it, if only for the kid who once wanted it. It was that kid who got me here, anyway.

I owe her everything, and I’ll love her forever and ever and ever.

Here are too many photos as of late, regarding summer in New York, July 4, turning 23, etc. Cheers.