it's a summer city

Why do I love new york so incredibly much at this time of year? 

The city awakens from its deep winter slumber. Like a bear out of hibernation, it shakes off its lethargy and is immediately in exploration of what newness is in the world after the dark winter months through which it slept. We are all generally happier, the weather thawing attitudes as well as the ground. More doors are held, more apologies are made and missteps forgiven, smiles run rampant through the human masses. People come out of the woodwork and hit the streets donning their finest, either in search of or already in mad love-with friends or themselves or lovers-really makes no difference as any way it escapes from the pores and we are all vicariously drunk on the same lust. Each one of us feels new again at the sight of the city in the summer. The sidewalks are packed full, life unfolding onto the streets just as the petals of a blooming rose open up to the world. Teenagers are up to no good, stoops echo with laughter, was the food at this place this good last time we were here? Everybody looks fly, you remember where the green grows and that new york has beautiful beaches, do I know you? I swear I know you from somewhere. I definitely know that girl. Music has never moved me so good, the fun is endless, good spirits boundless. Let the current sweep you away on bike rides through empty midnight streets with warm air grazing your skin...this is the stuff of good times. The best of times even. The city truly never sleeps. Each day is really two, with no sleep between except for the weary, and when we do sleep we keep on in our dreams the wakefulness of our days. It feels like an organism unto itself, with 8 million different parts but one heart beat, a pulse, the same for everyone, that anything is possible, as if we- every new yorker- were standing at the foot of the world, looking out upon it as though it were created for each one of us individually. A moment like life has just begun, everything that came before only a blip on the radar in comparison to the vastness of existence lying before us. The building lights form their own constellations, and we might realize, if our minds' eyes are open, that New York is an island at the center of the world, and we are all like Adam and Eve in its garden, feeling perfect and human, and life is too good not to eat of the forbidden fruit for we could not know its goodness without doing so and realizing our own impermanence...

Cheers to summers in NY, to loving life and persisting on the city's vitality, and to experiencing- the good and the bad, each enough to know the other.