SUMMER 2022
Hot Town, Summer in the City
The unexpected joys of staying put
As the heat of summer hit this year, as inflation wreaked havoc on our day-to-day cashflow, as the nation seemed trapped in a nasty political spiral, and I seemed locked to my laptop writing my first book, my boyfriend and I decided it was not the summer to “get back to life” as we knew it. In fact, we have never actually known summer life together in New York, having met and fallen in love behind the suffocating masks of the pandemic. This summer would be something new to us, because, well, our whole life together is new to us.
While I expected that we would spend the summer discovering beach towns and burbs out of the city, seeing friends and family who fled New York for the swimming pools and finer sands of Long Island, New Jersey, and New England, we made a very intentional choice in early June to simply stay put. We wanted no planes, no Ubers, no rental cars, and no hassle. The last two years — the first two — of our life together have been plagued with the hassle and endless logistics that come with an international relationship, one birthed during a series of worldwide crises. This summer, we wanted to get to know us, and we wanted to get to know our city. New York has been to hell and back since 2020 — as have we — so why not simply spend the summer here at…
