Ninety-eight degrees and the J train just decided to sit at Marcy Avenue with the doors open like it, too, was overwhelmed.
A heatwave in New York is its own genre of chaos. The platform smelled like a used towel. A man was fanning himself with a folded pizza box. Somebody's Bluetooth speaker played old Hindi songs and honestly? Correct choice. Kishore Kumar makes a delay bearable.
I gave up eventually and walked down into Williamsburg to wait it out. The heatwave had turned the whole neighborhood into a fever dream.
Kids had cracked open a fire hydrant on the corner and were screaming through the spray, and a few adults were pretending not to want in and then getting in. A dog lay flat on the cool concrete outside a bodega refusing to move for anyone.
I bought a mango kulfi — no, a mango popsicle, they didn't have kulfi, tragic — from the bodega and it started melting before I got the wrapper fully off. I ate it fast, over the sidewalk, that raccoon posture again. It's becoming a personality.
A heatwave strips the city down. Nobody's cool. Nobody's trying to be. Everyone's just a damp human trying to get to shade, and there's a weird democracy in that.
By the time the J train delay cleared, I'd sweated through a shirt I actually liked and made eye contact with about forty strangers, all of us united in suffering.
Back home in Ahmedabad, 98 degrees is a mild spring. My mother would laugh at me. But there's no fire hydrant to run through there, no J train to curse, no kulfi-adjacent popsicle bought in defeat.
This is my summer now. Sweaty, delayed, and somehow completely mine.
Stay hydrated. Ride the doors-open train. Let the hydrant kids win.
Love,