There’s this odd thing that happens in New York City. Maybe it happens everywhere else as well and I’ve just been here for so long I’ve forgotten, but for weeks, sometimes whole months on end, the moon disappears. Her absence almost always coincides with an unsettled feeling within me. Or maybe her absence affects that feeling. Either way, the moon goes away and I am restless, unsettled, discontent.

For a while now, the city sky has been empty. Likewise, I’ve been moving through life on edge, feeling more a passenger to the daily wave of Manhattan’s movement, than an agent of its momentum.

This has been one of the hottest weekends New York has seen in years, and has certainly constituted the first heat wave of the summer. I’ve spent it in a bit of a funk, perhaps partially due to the lack of air conditioning in my small and brick oven like box of an apartment, but for other, inexplicable reasons as well. I haven’t been able to escape a sense of expectancy, as if I am full to the brim with some feeling in need of expression and without any avenue through which to find it. It’s easy, in such cases, to expect the key to said expression to come from an outside source: the object of your affection, your friends, your finances, your vodka soda – the list goes on. I realize this, I realize this as I fall into it, knowing from experience that it’s a dynamic that needs to be humored, weathered and then released, and only in that order.

So it’s been a painful past week or so, waiting for this funk to pass. And I’ve done what I can to ease the waiting. I’ve gone out a bit, shopped in moderation, wandered the aisles of Fairway, etc. Today, for example, following last night’s low key evening of cocktails and girl talk with one of my best friends, I slept until two, before treating myself to Starbucks, and a movie. Maybe it was the copious exposure to air conditioning, maybe it was the iced frapuchino or whatever it was called, but I walked out of the cinema this evening feeling like the frustrated clouds of confusion that have colored the past two weeks, were finally rolling away. So I wandered a bit, testing out the waters of my emotional shift, walking up sixty ninth street to Columbus and stopping on my way to buy flowers, a weekly habit I surrendered years ago out of financial necessity. Nevertheless, it remains a decadent and delightful way in which I treat myself….even if these bodega bought blooms only last for three days before drooping.

Anyways, on the way home, turning the corner of 71^st street, bouquet in hand, I looked up and saw the moon, reappeared in a crescent incarnation and sitting like relief, low in the sky. Like my awkward mood, like the feeling of expectancy and the inescapable waiting period necessary to go through for it to pass, she was back in Manhattan’s sky, a return that coincided with my own.

It’s a reassuring thing, the constant change that comprises our lives. Like the way this hot weather descended upon the city, oppressive and bearing down upon us, affecting anger and annoyance. But as I write this, the thunder is rolling in and a summer storm approaches, heralded in by change and promising to the break the heat. If only for a little while.