Summer of Time & Space
We had hot girl summer. I nailed that one. Then brat summer. I think I was too old to understand that one. I’m calling this the summer of time and space — the thing I know I need and the thing that’s slowly killing me. It doesn’t sound sexy, but stay with me. I started it in Paris.
I am good at neither time nor space. Shocking, I know. I like responsive communication, prefer instant gratification, and find certainty palliative. The summer of time and space stems from being overwhelmed by the albatross of constant availability, which seems to have created this fog of ambiguity. Everyone is silently begging for someone else to set a boundary first, to say yes or no, rather than silence, banter, or a limp maybe.
No one actually enjoys the status quo. We’re all fucking miserable.
The more we suck emotion out of communication, boiling it down to the value of a bouillon cube, the more horrid the thoughts in our head become. We empower our thoughts to churn and let our frontal cortex take the wheel, much like Carrie Underwood’s Jesus. We let the silence make meaning. We take it personally rather than taking it for what it is — just a pocket of quiet.
Behold the millennial in her natural habitat, drafting her seventh version of “sounds good.” Not too cold — or god forbid, too warm.
The idea of “scheduled ambiguity” came to me when I realized how allergic I, and also the royal we, have become to pauses. We expect answers right now. We expect people to leap for us and with us — and for us to do it right back. A little co-dependent parkour if you will.
But sometimes jumping is a terrible idea. Sometimes you misjudge the gap and fall straight through. You’re not Tom Cruise, babe. You weren’t bitten by a radioactive Scientologist. And even he broke his leg one time. Sometimes the bravest thing isn’t the leap, but the wait. Taking a moment to figure out how to cross the chasm — safely, intentionally, without breaking anything in the process. Time and space isn’t always absence. Sometimes it’s just about care, because rushing to fill the margins might do more harm than good.
I arrived at Gare du Nord, did a quick change and a hooker shower at my hotel, and made my way over to JK Place, one of our best customers in Paris. A block from the hotel, headphones blaring to complement my hot girl strut over the Seine (because it’ll always be a hot girl summer), someone tapped my shoulder. He started speaking. I yanked my headphones out, forgetting they were noise-canceling.
“Do you speak French?”
“Terribly,” I answered.
“I would like to know you. Do you have time to talk for a minute?”
“I’m actually very late for a meeting. I’m so sorry.” He was cute in that unmatched, scruffy French way. No Ana, don’t be a frigid bitch, I thought.
“Could I have your number so we can meet again? How long are you here? Maybe we could have drinks?”
“I’m only here a few days, but I think I have to come back for a day or two next week. So, sure, you can have my number.” Better, Ana. Better.
It was a wild move. I never give out my number to strangers. But I felt good. I’d been in Paris 45 minutes and already been asked out in the street. Delicious. I typed my number into WhatsApp and went on my way.
I sat down at the completely empty bar at JK Place — understandable at 4:30PM — and asked if Emmanuelle, the beverage director, was around. She was off that day, so I introduced myself as the CEO of Amante to the bartender.
“Oh! We love Amante. It’s so good to meet you. I’m Henderson.”
Henderson, as it turns out, was American, originally from Texas, but had worked at several restaurants in New York before his French wife insisted they move back. I was suddenly very jealous of Henderson.
He asked about the brand origin story, so I told him — and then shared my favorite ways to consume it.
“How is it doing here?” I asked.
“Really well. Of course people order Aperol, but I always try to push them to try this new thing on the menu. People love it. We now get guests walking in and asking for Amante because they know we carry it.”
Reader, I melted.
I checked my phone. A text from my street suitor, Gaspar.
“I am very happy to have met you. Can I see you before you leave?”
The boldness. The assuredness. The sheer asking for my number on the street — Americans don’t do that.
Here we had no time. No space. But the situation didn’t require it. I’d meet him for drinks once and never see him again, or just flirt with him over WhatsApp and leave our only meeting as the one on Rue du Bac.
For the first year of Amante I lived on the road — mostly a NY, LA, Rome rotation. Lately, I’ve been grounded, managing everything from home, as the job required.
What I’ve always loved about traveling alone was the space. Over long stretches of time, in the strangest and most regular corners of the universe, I could do anything. I could make someone fall in love with me. Or at least take me to dinner and tell me I’m extraordinary. I could sit in space and time and suss out what my soul was missing.
And a part of what my soul has been missing is a shove to go be merry with fun people (and still get some work done too). Life doesn’t always have to be so serious, remember?
Fate also has a way of stepping in when you need it most. A friend texted me while I was contemplating whether to leave London, that he had contacts for me at The Ritz, Harry’s, Hotel Lutetia, and the Bvlgari in Paris. I’d kill to have Amante become a household name — or rather, a household bar call, in any of them.
At Bar Vendôme at The Ritz, I introduced myself to the head barman, Roman (barman is the respectful title in Italy and France — never “mixologist”). Case closed in minutes. Next one of the bartenders from Bar Hemingway took me for drinks at Harry’s Bar where he introduced me to the owner. I whipped a bottle out of my bag and gave my charming pitch in my dainty little sundress that simultaneously says I’m sweet and little but also maybe I will destroy you if you prefer that.
I was finally starting to pull myself out of my mental trench. A gentler way to describe what I’d been going through. I had gotten so fatigued, so apathetic, that I couldn’t do what I do best — sit down at a bar and charm the apron off the guy behind it. And that’s my entire job. And within an hour of arrival, I’d already scored three wins. Lightning was coming out of my veins. I suddenly saw all of my emotional slop with some perspective — an Eiffel Tower’s view on this particular episode of getting stuck in the muck.
I live in fear of being too much — a fear that only arrives after I’ve already said what I think. Then my memory turns prosecutorial. Did I freak him out? Was I not soft enough? Were my political views espoused too frothily. Was my double text too much? We fear double texting more than dying alone.
We are the anxious generation. The lonely generation. And in a way, the slightly abandoned one. We don’t have Gen Z’s chaotic magic or clarity of voice. We pretend to understand brat summer, but we really just like to shower and leave early.
My generation is perhaps the worst at speaking to one another. We weren’t raised fluent in digital chaos. So we assign gravity to gossamer and hang our hopes on punctuation. An unresponded text sits there like an anchor — even when there was no real weight to the conversation to begin with. We make myth from nothing. We talk through so many different channels that we never say anything and certainly never get close.
There’s something deeply humiliating about wanting closeness so badly and not knowing how to ask for it without sounding overwhelming. We’ve replaced connection with cleverness. A text like “hey can we talk” is so loaded when it doesn’t have to be. Maybe we just want to chat. Maybe we have something specific to say. Maybe you have [insert some obscure STD] and didn’t want to put that in writing. We don’t know.
Usually, the communication isn’t laced with emotional explosives — but our anxious brains are obsessed with pretending it is. Which all gets back to time and space. Not just taking a beat to think before mental looping, but using the manifested ether to see something in all its kaleidoscopic fractals.
The chaotic traveler I am kept getting convinced to extend her stay — first by friends, then by bartenders who offered to introduce me to other bartenders, at other bars, who might want to carry Amante too. It was a string of spontaneous meetings, dinners, and the kind of social momentum that builds when you have a bottle in your bag and nowhere to be before 4 p.m. when beverage directors get in to work.
By day three, I needed a break from people.
My shoulders had been locked at my ears for 48 hours straight.
I’m used to traveling alone. I like the silence. I like slipping into a city and feeling anonymous. Instead I had been on a marathon of back-to-back conversations, and the social overload was short-circuiting me a little bit.
So I walked to the Marais and sat down at the bar at Chez Janou. It was 12:02 p.m. I checked. I didn’t want to order wine before noon — not because of the optics, but because I like arbitrary self-discipline.
The bartender approached me with a wine list and I felt my entire body exhale for the first time in days, not because I wasn’t having fun but because I’d been having too much of it and doing too much.
“Please pick your favorite white wine for me?”
“What do you like?”
“Dry, please,” I said, with the kind of charming smirk I reserve for bartenders and customs agents who question me when I say “nope I didn’t buy a THING during my month in Europe! Can you believe it?!”
He reached out his hand. “I am Samir. Your name?”
“Ana.” I shook it and he put his second hand around mine. The sexiest kind of handshake.
Samir poured the wine and leaned in just enough to suggest I’d be taken care of, without making it weird. Samir let me sit in silence while I wrote at the bar — about time, space, overstimulation, and how badly I wanted to disappear without disappearing entirely. The ability to exist in a public retreat without justification.
But here’s the thing about getting what you want: you immediately start wanting something else. Ten minutes into my perfect solitude, I found myself checking my phone. Not because I expected anything urgent, but because silence makes you want to fill it. Even chosen silence. Even medicinal silence.
I was finally getting the space I’d been dying for, and my brain was already looking for ways to sabotage it.
After a while, he called one of the waiters over. “Ana, this is Henry.”
Henry smiled and said, “Ana, no working here.”
I laughed and started to correct him. “I’m not—” but Samir cut in.
“You can do whatever you want here.”
I re-melted.
Words perfectly simple and cinematic — the kind of line that makes you feel like the city is conspiring with you to be exactly where you are, doing exactly what you’re doing. Just a midday glass of wine and two strangers reminding me that the best kind of space is the kind that asks nothing of you.
“You write for a living?” Henry asked.
“No, just a side thing.”
Samir walked back over to refill my wine. ‘On me.’
I ordered ratatouille. As I polished off the mushed vegetables — just the way I like them — he returned
“How is the food?” he asked.
“Perfect,” I answered.
“Ah just like you.”
I love Paris.
This was what space was supposed to feel like. Not the anxious void of waiting for some reply, but actual breathing room to be adored or left alone. The difference between imposed silence and chosen. Between space that feels like abandonment and breathing room that feels like the best meal you’ve ever had.
And then, scrolling through my phone, I saw it. A text from three days ago. From a guy my friend insisted I meet. ‘Hey, [redacted] gave me your number. Would love to take you out for drinks sometime when you’re back from Europe.’
I cringed. I’d completely forgotten. Not just forgotten to respond — forgotten he existed. I’d been so wrapped up in my internal pontificating, that I’d become the exact thing I claim to resent: the person who leaves you hanging in digital purgatory.
Maybe he was doing his own forensic analysis: Did she see it? Is she not interested? Meanwhile I hadn’t given any of it any thought. I was just distracted. If the situation were reversed and you tried to tell me that, I’d bite you.
But silence doesn’t absolve you. It just delays the consequence.
I started typing three different responses. Deleted them all. And forgot again.
This is how we become the villains in our own stories about communication. It’s a chain. We’re all the villain making someone else’s life terrible by taking some deservedly self-indulgent time and space. Not through malice, but through self-discovery crossed with self obsession.
Paris also reminded me that this ambient, intentional drift thing is still rather complicated. Rarely do we get the balance right. Most of the time we’re either suffocating each other or disappearing entirely. Space feels incredible when you choose it, i.e solo wine at noon. It feels torturous but good for you, when it’s self-imposed. But even chosen space gets complicated when you start missing connection and no longer want the runway you know is making you better.
I sat at the bar in all my latitudinal and spatial glory thinking about how I frame it as noble — the emotionally mature thing to do.
We want to believe that a pause can mean thinking, growing, and I’m trying to meet you where you are. But sometimes it just means: I’m gone. I’m avoiding the part where I make you cry.
And yet — we still use it. I schedule myself into exile when I’m unsure. When I’m scared. When I don’t want to hurt someone but don’t want to be held accountable either. It feels kinder, but might actually be crueler. Because clarity, even when it stings, is a gift. Silence, packaged as grace, can be the slowest arm twisting — the most drawn out game of Rose Garden.
Maybe time and space are both love and cowardice, wisdom and avoidance. Maybe they only make sense in hindsight — and even then, we lie to ourselves about what they meant. Is silence deafening because it speaks blood-curdling volumes, or is the silence the respite before the light? The liminal zone feels so Jane Austen. It gives you that Colin Firth in Love Actually breathing room. It doesn’t have to mean doom, even if most of the pauses I’ve lived through started in a dark tunnel and never made their way out.
And yet I’m still advocating for delay and drift. Still calling this my summer of both. I also think I love it because it’s strategic. Like Battleship. A game of near misses and long silences. Methodically placing each ship. Studying your opponent to determine where they might put theirs. Are they edge players or cluster types? It takes rhythm, patience, and understanding.
But that means I also know how it feels on the other side — when the only synonym for “space” your internal thesaurus can generate is “disappear.” When breathing room sinks all your battleships — and we know there are no lifeboats in this game.
Nonetheless, it felt time to leave Paris. I’d had fun, accomplished a ton (hey, rhyme!), and didn’t need to tempt it with an extra night that could sour the whole thing. I made the decision while I paid the check. I took off my reading glasses and replaced them with sun ones. Samir called over, “goodbye beautiful.” I turned red and waved. “See you soon!”
I started walking back to the hotel, headphones jammed back in so as to pretend I was playing the soundtrack to my Drinking Alone movie. A man — no, boy — who couldn’t have been older than 19 jumped in front of me. He appeared to be part of a group that I swear was a class field trip. “Can I introduce myself?” I giggled and said no thank you with the kindest smile I have in my Rolodex. I can’t do age gaps that big in the downward direction.
I went back to the hotel, packed my suitcase, and continued on. To more time. More space. In a new space. With all the time my anxious little mind could bear. I told you time and space could be sexy.
I also kind of hate it.
So here for sexy space summaaa