In the summer here it feels like the sun never goes down all the way, there’s a persistent low throb, there’s always some more heat and noise spilling over the rim of the horizon. Every hour of sleep is warm and active and your dreams are warm and vivid and syrupy, like a bottle of grenadine spilled on a radiator. Heavy trucks roll by and jiggle your apartment non stop. You can be active and awake at any time of day and other people will be doing the same, unfazed by your existence, from the earliest gasps of the morning all the way through to the end of the night, when the rollgates on the bodegas clatter open. You find yourself doing a dozen different things in a day that, had the been done individually in the winter, would make your day notable, something you would tell your mom about on the phone. You (or at least I seem to) bop from borough to borough, beach to boogie down, show to party to late night fire escapes and 24 hour dumplings and do it again the following sunup to sundown. You give your phone number out freely and guilelessly, shouting over the music, you walk over bridges, you sprawl supine in the grass in parks on your lunch breaks.

I stopped to roll these sensations around in my mouth a bit recently in the middle of a wet blizzard, halfway through a long walk home in the athleisure wear I had put on that morning (tapered sweatpants, who I have become), not expecting the heavy weather and not expecting the altered state. I felt deliciously, deliriously out of control. Not that I was in danger or even necessarily causing myself harm, more that I had surrendered to something greater than myself, I had been caught up in some great gust of circumstance and here I was, fucked up in my wet running shoes, blood sparkling with a half bottle of wine and grinning like an idiot because I remembered suddenly that summer is promised to us, I remembered that I'd walk by this basketball court again in a few months to sit on my friend's stoop again.

On the way back from a show the other night I paused on my last entry step to listen to the hail that had begun to fall, rattling on the roof of the car I had taken home and tenderly striking the tops of my cheeks and lightly moistening my synthesizers in their tote bags. Just a small moment alone. I beheld very little weather growing up - I never saw snow fall until I was 18, though rain and smog were common in California - but one day I remember when I was very young while sitting in our kitchen I heard a noise I had never heard before. Loud and angry and metallic, like stone fists striking metal, speaking an indecipherable tongue, maybe I thought it was the voice of God. Soon I noticed small chunks of ice coming from the hood above the oven, smooth and white, now an oversized soda machine, spitting frozen bits of water onto the stove. My mom walked in, head cocked, and said, "oh, it's hailing." And I couldn't wrap my head around it. I stared up and listened to the creator babbling.