White Hot New York Summer

waiting for a feeling // i get sad in the summer

rain is finally breaking the New York City Summer Heat Wave and i have begun to understand why people used to dance naked in a field and make human sacrafices for rain gods. the rain came and i was finally able to cry again, something my summertime saddness has not allowed me to do. that’s the worst of my bouts of depression. always has been. when i get so sad i get numb, so numb i can’t cry. i become paralyzed, unable to apply for jobs and do laundry and answer text messages. i become a bad friend. i am not the best pet owner. any chance of being a good writer is thrown out the window, which is why i removed the Buffer Cake piece published for a few hours this past week. i won’t say it was bad, though that’s exactly what i think of it, but moreso forced. my words trudging through quicksand across the page, fighting to be made into a concise thought or point. it makes sense it would feel that way when the past month has felt that way.

summertime saddness always hurts in a special kind of way. i’m not sure if mine is the kind Lana Del Rey spoke of, though when i listen to her version i do feel a similar sense of reach. reaching out into something i cannot grasp. getting further from myself. maybe it’s the sense of forced fun, forced in the way that everyone is expecting you to have it because the sun is out and everyone is tan and oiled up and sexier. to add insult to injury, they have been telling me i am meant to be having a Brat Summer. the most unhinged and deliciously fun summer of my life. in an archive of Georgia O’keeffe’s letters to Russle Vernon Hunter, she writes “I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.” the quote is making its rounds again on Twitter and Instagram and those sad TikTok slide shows and try as i may, i cannot find the full letter from which the quote was extracted. but something tells me I don’t need to read the full length letter to know exactly what Geogia O’Keeffe was talking about.

July is always brutal, perhaps because it’s my birth month. i was born in the Greatest East Coast Heat Wave of the 1990’s, you know. a leo born to a leo mother and a sagittarius father. it’s really too much fire that does it. that’s what i choose to believe anyway. my gradparents home, where I grew up, also burnt to the ground in the 80’s. i hope i don’t sound like a schizo, trying to connect imaginary dots, but understand what i mean when i say that my life is so interwoven with fire. ruled by it really. when my seasonal summer depression settles in i can only assume it’s due to all the heat- figuratively and literally. like a little pressure cooker ready to combust. it makes me sick. i am just as happy to watch summer arrive as i am to watch it leave. it may be the one toxic relationship i’ll never stick my claws into. the only love affair I won’t beg to stay. maybe because it’s also the one i know will always come back, no matter what.

i had a handle on June. i moved into my apartment mid month and by all accounts, took the city by the throat. my new 9 to 5 was becoming one with the concrete. popping into museums and art exhibitions and seeing over priced indie films downtown. i battled the first week of what would be a summer long brutal heat wave and made good on my promise to sit in Central Park everyday, because I lived 20 minutes away from it and how lucky am i to live 20 minutes away from Central Park? i packed my lunch everyday for solo picnics in a special spot my ex showed me years ago when the city belonged to them and the thought i could ever own a part of it was something i dared not dream of. i prayed to god i’d never run into them, sometimes questioning if it was weird for me to be somewhere they showed me at all when i had the whole rest of the park to dwell in. the relationship never did me any real favors so i should be able to take a little something, i decided.

pretty quickly did i take the UES streets in search of a part time job while the real full time job search soldiered on. i trudged to Staples to print out my service industry resume in 98 degree weather and while waiting at a cross walk, i felt an even warmer, wetter sensation on my ankle. a ratty chihuahua was relieving himself on my Nike, the owner not noticing till it was too late, yanking the dog away and speed walking in another direction. i felt a rush of tears boil to the surface but i have intense pride when it comes to crying in public and there was no way in hell i was letting Park Ave see me break. i regretted not crying later on. swallowing pennies down my throat, i quickly ran home with exactly 17 printed resumes to shower and regain dignity. was it dignified to slide makeup on my sweat slicked face and walk around in cowboy boots trying to ammulate hot-cool-hostess vibes to every resturant in my nieghborhood? i don’t know, but i do think you’ve got to be a little merciful in this life. grovel a little. after several refusals to even take a copy hand out i was basically hired on the spot at a dimly lit wine bar ran but etherally hot italian and brazilians. i narcissistally invisioned myself as the main character in some coming of age movie, a dumb little girl from Pennsylvania trying to make it in Manhatten with her dumb little cowboy boots.

i made my whole months rent in one week through a temporary night nanny position for a recently divored man who owned a hedge fund and NHL team. while getting the two young children ready for bed one night, i answered a knock at the door and revealed a 6 foot russian model who looked younger than me. she looked past me and the toddler i had on my hip in a way that wasn’t so much demeaning but more like she was intoxicated, asking where the He was. i stammered and invited her in and called up to Him, my voice echoing in the absurdly large two level high rise apartment. be right down! he called. i tried not to look at her and assumed the position of the The Help, fading into the wall while i fed the kids their bed time milk and cookies. this repeated for the full week. a new girl, no older than me, knocking at the door mid bedtime and asking for Him. a beautiful russian, an angelic ginger, a classic All American Blonde. he’d come home with them drunk, telling them to go upstairs while he paid me and made a night cap drink. i tried not to stare as they trudged up the stairs, heels slung over their shoulder giggling. he’d tell me how the date went, loud enough for them to hear and honest enough for them to be offended. “she doesn’t eat meat, i took her to a steak house, why the fuck wouldn’t she tell me beforehand?” he’d hand me a wads of fifties, different but large amounts each night. i got sent home with their personal driver in a suped out sprinter van with red leather interior. i thought of the girls on the way home. if i were smarter maybe i’d use them as inspiration. eat less and get strict about my skincare. i know my reach, but if i tried really hard i could get close enough for men to not notice i wasn’t the real deal. by the end of the week i decided to stick with my original stance on the whole sugar daddy thing; i don’t care to be a part of a world that someone else has the keys to.

working late nights in the resturant eventually fucked up my sleep schedule enough to where i couldn’t wake before 11am, which led to being bound to my apartment till late afternoon because the heat became too overbearing to venture out before 6pm. my roommate is a therapist who takes calls from her bedroom, so i worked hard to being quiet and tried to write and make use of my time. i missed my friends. i missed my Pennsylvania summers filled with backroads and someone’s backyard pool. i missed driving. i felt sorry for my cat who i recently domesticated from the barn to a 500 sq ft apartment. job interviews came and went stale. i realized how aweful i was at interviewing, how my jokes never landed and how my inclination to get dry mouth when asked long winded questions on my career history read like incompetency. i couldn’t even muster up a journal entry and july was meant to be the month i started initiating pay walls for my content because i was going to be Producing So Much Of It. i read and re-read Lana Del Rey’s poetry, specifically LA, who am i to love you?

I left my city for San Francisco
Took a free ride off a billionaire's jet
LA, I'm from nowhere, who am I to love you?
LA, I've got nothing, who am I to love you when I'm feeling this way and I've got nothing to offer?
LA, not quite the city that never sleeps
Not quite the city that wakes, but the city that dreams, for sure
If by dreams, you mean in nightmares

who was i to stake my claim on this city, to think it would bring me great inspiration and fuel my writing and most absurdly, my happiness. i feared my expectations were too high and necessary effort underestimated. i felt foolish and hated myself for feeling lonely, as if i could expect anything else by being alone in a new city. i tried to pinpoint my saddness on my solitude, but some days i felt that it was more dissasociation than anything. i felt that i had been plucked up by some large giant and placed in this new life and forgot to take my soul with me. like, i wasn’t all there or something. i’d get on the subway and zone out, blinking after a few moments to only realize it had been half an hour and my destination had passed several stops ago. i dunked my face in cold water. i pinched my upper arm. wake up, please wake up. this isn’t how you’re meant to feel. look where you are. be greatful. be fucking greatful.

i blamed my brain fog on all the gluten intake of my nightly shift meals of pasta at the wine bar and refused to believe in what i knew to be true; i was experiencing a depressive episiode. it’s easy to ignore when you aren’t curled up in a ball crying all the time. my kind of depression is easy to ignore. numb is numb. it’s autopilot. it’s just a dimming of the lights, not quite a blackout. i smoked cigarettes and drank coffee to help me feel wired, to help me feel anything. i was only briefly myself when i interacted with friends who came to visit. things only started getting better when i took a trip upstate, and sat in the silence of the catskills and baptized myself in lake water. i’m sure that “nature” “healed” me in some regard, though i’d hate to be so cliché. i sat outside the tiny airbnb house and gripped grass between my fingers and toes and focussed on the smell of lavender in the meadow, the cool runoff of lake breeze. i took a few moments each day where me and [name redacted] took time apart to journal or make a phone call or step out so one another could shit in confidence and treated my body like it was having a panic attack. focussing on something i could taste, something i could feel, something i could smell. i got meditative at some points. envisioning my spirit up in the third dimension floating back down to me. one journal entry from that week reads please come back to me in poor penmanship over and over again. everything that is happening to you now is so important, you really have got to be here for it.

say it was upstate, say it was the rain breaking the heat, but i feel less like a body and more like a Person In A Body this week. like this whole summer was one big luteal phase and i am feeling the relief of a fresh bleed. a foot lifted off the back of my neck. i wish i had a grand metaphor for depression through all of this, something whimsical that this last episiode has taught me. but my summertime saddness runs like the wind; going where it pleases and lingering till it wants to leave. i can say that in defense of being uncomfortable in a new environment, it best serves you to know that it is not your body reacting to the new thing but the change itself. i revisted morning stretches this past week and as i reached for my toes and felt a tugging pain in my back and quads i remembered the body still aches even while receiving what it needs. these past few summers i have felt like i have lost myself somewhere along the way, and just like O’Keeffe, i spent so much of my time waiting to return. what emerges in the end is often not quite what i had before, but something a little new and a little unfamilar. something that requires a re-acquaintance of sorts. i’m in the re-acquaintance phase but i am still fearful this is a placebo and i will return to my stalemate in the next few days, going from manual to autopilot in my sleep one night. that the giant will return and pluck my soul back up, tossing it into the abyss and watching gleefully as i try and take it back again. maybe so, but for now i’ll just chalk it up to a White Hot New York Summer.

White Hot New York Summer Prayer

help me to serve my city

to never take pity on myself

take my days in stride

want what i have

love what i’ve got

remember what i have lost

and see that it is never all for not

what will come in its place is greater

so much more than i could have asked

but never more than i can hold

only just enough for me to grasp

- h.n

love, h.n<3

thank you so much for participating in the publication of this piece. your support means the world to me. if you enjoy this newsletter, consider sharing with a friend, family member, or reposting on social media. if there are any questions, comments, or general conversational points you’d like to discuss please never hesitate to reach out via social media or email. take care.

email: Hailey.Noecker99@gmail.com

IG: HAILOGRAM