It was a Friday afternoon. I remember us, my newly-minted first real group of friends and I, having left our eighth-grade school day early. Maybe it’s just that, compared to a normal adult American workday, school gets out very early, early enough on a Friday in late May to feel like a backward echo of what summer Fridays would feel like in New York when I first moved here and discovered them. I’ve never actually had summer Fridays myself - with the exception of one year at an office job, I’ve always worked freelance, from retail jobs to tutoring to writing, but maybe it was the very fact that they belonged to someone else that made summer Fridays seem so enticing. On Friday afternoons in New York between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Friday felt like the same complete emotion it is for a kid set free from school for two whole days. We were briefly collectively pardoned from the dour march of capitalism and lifted into the wide-eyed cadence of tourism. We ordered more drinks than we should, rolled up our shirtsleeves, tilted our necks far back to look up at the how the angles of buildings left the ground and ascended the heavens. We sat outside or in the public-living-room spaces somewhere between outside and inside and watched the afternoon turn a long blue. The day felt like clean water in a glass, open and unweighted, like it was set outside of the grind of ongoing time.
Dry Down Solo #2: Cool Water (HF)
Dry Down Solo #2: Cool Water (HF)
Dry Down Solo #2: Cool Water (HF)
It was a Friday afternoon. I remember us, my newly-minted first real group of friends and I, having left our eighth-grade school day early. Maybe it’s just that, compared to a normal adult American workday, school gets out very early, early enough on a Friday in late May to feel like a backward echo of what summer Fridays would feel like in New York when I first moved here and discovered them. I’ve never actually had summer Fridays myself - with the exception of one year at an office job, I’ve always worked freelance, from retail jobs to tutoring to writing, but maybe it was the very fact that they belonged to someone else that made summer Fridays seem so enticing. On Friday afternoons in New York between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Friday felt like the same complete emotion it is for a kid set free from school for two whole days. We were briefly collectively pardoned from the dour march of capitalism and lifted into the wide-eyed cadence of tourism. We ordered more drinks than we should, rolled up our shirtsleeves, tilted our necks far back to look up at the how the angles of buildings left the ground and ascended the heavens. We sat outside or in the public-living-room spaces somewhere between outside and inside and watched the afternoon turn a long blue. The day felt like clean water in a glass, open and unweighted, like it was set outside of the grind of ongoing time.