A City Baptism

Summer in New York is not kind. It doesn’t caress, it baptizes. The heat rises from the pavement

like incense and drips down our backs like holy water. Step onto a subway platform in July and

you’ll understand: this city doesn’t ask you to endure, it demands that you surrender.

And so we do. We surrender in layers. The crisp white shirts of June yellow by July. Linen, once

aspirational, becomes limp and traitorous. Hair products lose their authority; mascara rebels. By

midseason, everyone is marked with the streaks, stains, and shine that makes us unmistakably

New Yorkers in summer. The city peels us back until we’re nothing but flesh.

You can see it for yourself if you pay attention. The streets of SoHo, once peppered with

blowouts, are now home to sweaty slickbacks and frizzy updos–anything to feel the slight breeze

of the Zara air conditioning when they walk by. The DJs of the Lower East Side may not have

relinquished their baggy jeans, but the stains on their wife beaters have become more and more

apparent. Even the Upper East Side matrons have started to loosen: their silk blouses spotted,

their coiffed hair losing volume by the minute, their composure slipping ever so slightly.

The summer grit unties us, because no one is spared. It doesn’t matter if you’ve fled to Montauk

on the weekends or lingered on fire escapes with a bottle of Barefoot, by the time August rolls in,

we all look baptized in the same brine. Sweat makes us porous, vulnerable, exposed. It ruins and

it frees us in the same breath.

And in that exposure, the city feels more intimate, more charged. Strangers glance at one another

on blistering train platforms with the same expression: I see you. We are in this together. The

streets are shut down, with folding tables packed like sardines down the curb. Sweaty thighs

stick to metal chairs, but as long as there’s not a sweaty glass in hand, nobody cares. There is a

silent agreement amongst us that absolves us from all shame. The sweat isn’t a flaw; it’s the

price we pay for the summer we’ve dreamed about.

That’s the real secret: grit is New York’s glamour.

And maybe that’s why, year after year, we secretly love it. Because in the baptism of a New

York summer, we’re all transformed, not into our best selves, but into our realest ones.