Thoughts from the summer solstice

Reflections on summers in the city

In honor of New York City’s first snow of the season this week—and as we near the winter solstice—I thought I’d dig into my Notes app archives and polish up an unfinished thought-dump of nostalgia from the summer solstice.

“you OK?”

“I’m at my sister’s. Call me”

The gray bubbles popped up in succession on my phone around 10 p.m. on a Saturday in late June. The first Saturday of the summer, one day after the solstice, when the high reached a balmy 84°F and the heat wave hadn’t quite set in yet.

When I received the texts, which were from one of my closest friends, I was doing karaoke at an omakase restaurant with my fiancé at a spot near our apartment. But two hours earlier, we had been sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park, facing southwest, nostalgic tears streaming down my face.

Summer in the city always does this to me. This summer, the summer of 2025, is my 19th summer in New York City—every summer but one spent here since 2006. The months when people usually flee the smells, the humidity, the sweaty subway platforms, are the months that make me feel most alive here.

Sitting on that bench brings me back to being 18 in 2006, just finishing my freshman year of college, being the only person I knew with an internship in New York. I wasn’t alone-alone. I lived with my aunt, uncle, and 5-year-old cousin; but I moved here for the summer with no friends—AIM my main tether to the few friends I had made at college—and a dream. A dream of finding a place to fit in, where my brand of oddness (in my head at least) wouldn’t stand out the way it did in my suburban hometown. (Why else does anyone move to New York City, even temporarily?) I had been ready to be an adult, in control of my own life, for as long as I could remember, and the summer of 2006 was the first taste of that.

I would walk to the Upper West Side from Midtown East, just to explore the city. (This was pre-Google Maps and iPhones, and this is how I made sense of the city and its convenient grid system.) I would sit in a little clearing in Central Park near The Ramble to read on the weekends. I would go the Crunch Gym on 81st and Amsterdam and pretend I wasn’t going back to Georgia in August. I didn’t have a lot of friends in the city—most of my fellow interns were from Long Island or New Jersey, so they’d commute home and spend time with their own friend groups from their own lives. I did become close with one coworker, and she introduced me to a little Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side on my last night in the city. But for most of the summer, my solitude became my solace; there really isn’t a better place to be alone than New York City, especially as an 18-year-old desperate to grow up.

Sitting on that bench brings me back to being 20 in 2008, when I was living in a Columbia dorm room with an acquaintance who would become a soulmate that summer—the same soulmate who texted me nearly two decades later to check in. We shared a room in a 5-person dorm suite—every other room was a single, but we were squashed together with two tiny closets and two tiny desks to go with our tiny bunk bed. I’d wake up every morning to her alarm blaring Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight” and we’d get ready for the day: internships in midtown; donation-based yoga in the East Village where we’d throw a crumpled $1 bill in the bucket without making eye contact with the instructor; followed by the trek back up to 116th Street for a dinner of Saltines and Nutella before going to one of the bars on Broadway, fake ID in tow. (Most of the time, I didn’t even need it in the city—confidently ordering a glass of Pinot Grigio as a 20-year-old at a restaurant can go a long way.)

On the weekends, we’d go shopping on East 86th Street—where there was an H&M (which hadn’t yet made its way to Georgia), stocking our tiny closets with tiny fast fashion tunics that we inexplicably wore as dresses. We’d go to the East Village for bottomless mimosa brunches, and then nap it off on a blanket in the Washington Square Park grass. We’d have friends from Georgia visit us and show them our favorite spots—the reservoir in Central Park, the Forever 21 in Union Square, that one little Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side!—and feel like we already belonged.

Sitting on that bench brings me back to being 23 in 2011—my first full summer here after making the move official in July 2010. My friends and I rented bikes and rode down the West Side Highway, with views of Lady Liberty and New Jersey. We went to the inaugural Governor’s Ball Music Festival, when it was actually on Governor’s Island. (The lineup included Girl Talk, Mac Miller, Passion Pit—the early 2010s were a beautiful fever dream.) We dutifully kept up with the “happy hour by day” spreadsheet that had been bequeathed to us by our foremothers (friends of friends and older sisters), ensuring that we never paid full price for a vodka cran. We did karaoke in crowded bars to songs that became our anthems, because we really were taking our passions and making them happen!

Sitting on that bench brings me back to being 27 in 2015, when I was desperately trying to unravel myself from a toxic relationship. I would go on long walks alone with sad music in my earbuds, pretend everything was fine at what I thought was my dream corporate job, and hide how bad things were from my friends, until I couldn’t hide it any longer and they helped me rebuild.

Sitting on that bench brings me back to being 32 in 2020—in the midst of the global pandemic, having not left the city in more than 7 months—celebrating my 10th “official” anniversary of living in New York. I sat with my boyfriend at a socially-distanced table outside of that same little Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side that I first went to in 2006—and I now lived just 15 blocks away and was a regular.

Sitting on that bench brings me back to being 36 in 2024, visiting a few jewelers with my longtime boyfriend to choose an engagement ring. I didn’t move here for love; I moved here for life, but I found that the more love in your life—romantic, platonic, or otherwise—the more life you experience, and there is no place better to build a life than New York—the platonic love the city offers sustaining you when everything else feels futile.

Sitting on that bench in the balmy air, at that moment just before the summer sun dips down below the buildings and the light is hitting the leaves just so—I shed a tear for my past self, my friends, my soon-to-be husband, for every person who shaped every summer in the city.

“i’m OK!!! was just overwhelmed by a massive wave of nostalgia,” I texted back to Jenny, that bunk bed-acquaintance-turned-soulmate from that summer of 2008, who spent 6 years living here until a new career pulled her away.

“love & miss you so much,” she wrote back. “That summer changed the course of my life for the better.”

Me too, Jenny. What a feeling.