Dear Future,

In honor of this 80-degree October day, here’s another “Dear Future” essay, this time from the dog days of July. Sent from past me, to you all, and to the future.

x. O

7/2023

Dear future,

It’s almost August, and everything (I mean everything) is sweating like a champagne bottle in heat of the “hottest summer on record”. When my friends from elsewhere moved to New York for their 20’s experiences, I learned that my whole life has been lived in temperate extremes. Summer in New York isn’t just summer, it’s like hell rose up from the depths of the earth to take its annual, 3 month vacation. The air feels like a 90 degree weighted blanket that only covers you with more intensity when you’re forced to descend into the depths of the subway, where you will pray like a recent convert for a train (any train) to pass by and afford you with a lukewarm breeze. 

When you leave the house you have to battle between wearing as little as possible, to be comfortable, or feeling sweat run down the legs of your jeans, because the cat callers are out. On the street, the rich pungent scent of hot garbage, piss, and inexplicably, scrambled eggs, abound. When you walk past a Hyatt and get a brief icy chill in the face, you think you know what heaven must feel like.

I’ve never really given much thought to god, but I believe wholeheartedly in the autonomy of this city. It giveth, and it taketh away. There are Good New York days and Bad New York days, and the ones that are in between are the ones you blissfully forget. Today was a Good New York day. My train may not have been running, but there was a functioning E-bike waiting for me after I forfeited my $2.75 (soon to be $2.90) to the MTA. The public pool only had 10 people swimming there and only one (1) unseemly clump of hair floating in the bottom. When I was running unforgivably late, the train ran express to my stop, making me suddenly a cool 15 minutes late. The angry man on my train car quickly moved to another one. The heat seemed like a sauna, not hellfire. 

On a Bad New York day, anything could happen. You could, for example, be charged 13 dollars for a small plastic cup of wine, even though the price on the menu clearly states 6, and, before noticing, you could have added a 20% tip and paid $17 dollars, the cost of dinner, for one beverage. Just an example. I’ve learned in these moments, to take a breath and forfeit my day to New York, as you would something on an altar. Living in New York means you are offering up your body and your mind to a place that smells like bodega dust, but just might change your life.

From June until August, people in New York like to pretend that everything is fantastic. If it feels like a tropical vacation, we should treat it that way. Nothing is less like a tropical vacation than pulling your 50lb bag of laundry down 5 blocks and then up three flights of stairs. On your tropical vacation, you don’t spend 20 guilty minutes wondering if you gave the German tourists bad directions. 

Everyone who can leave, does. The tomatoes in my community garden are about to burst, spilling seeds on the ground where they will stick to the concrete until the next torrential rain. Summer is abundance, and it is rot. 

When I was young, my babysitter was the coolest person I knew. Fresh out of Barnard, she smelled good, lived in Brooklyn, dated people who weren’t men, and wanted to be a dancer. I asked her what it was like being a grown-up, and she said something along the lines of “It’s not always easy, but if I decide I want pancakes and bacon in the middle of the night, I can have it.” Sometimes, when I worry that I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, I remind myself that now I can get pancakes whenever I want. 

Since my last letter, I ran my first (and last) 5K, I have applied for many more jobs, I have written 63 pages of a book, and I have learned to roller-skate at the same time. I still have the strange feeling that nothing has changed much. Maybe that’s because I’m well-adjusted or maybe it’s because I’m stuck. Only time will tell, I guess.

My friend, the one I went to pre-school with, is turning 25 tomorrow. When I was 10, 25 seemed almost forbidden in its strangeness. When I was 18, I thought I would cry panicked tears when turning 20. Now, I’m planning a surprise birthday party for the person I’ve known all my life and we talk about weddings instead of first kisses, but we still send the same emojis back and forth.

My friend, the one from college, is moving out of our apartment and to grad school. Who would I be if I, too, left New York, this place I’ve been cleaved to all my life? Who would I be if I stayed? We all ask ourselves the same questions over and over, and then, we turn to our roommates and ask them, over beer or wine or ginger tea, hoping they’ll have an answer. 

Who will I be when, eventually, we all find our place to settle, and the tenuous balance of friendships falls to the wayside? What if I, like Frances Ha, watch all my friends advance before me, chess pieces that I long for as they move over white and black squares? Will I also spend all my money on a trip to Paris, and sleep the whole time? Probably.

All in all, we find reasons to celebrate. We host sweaty birthday parties in the park and buy cheap Prosecco to toast with when people quit their shitty jobs and move on to other ones. We cook cold soup dinners and tape boxes and replace old spatulas with newer ones. We wait for the decay to set in, the trash juices to run down the cracks in the subway, and the cool breeze of fall to welcome us back from hell and into a new season.