I want to talk about the bodega egg sandwich, because it saved an otherwise mediocre Saturday in Harlem.
I woke up grumpy. No reason. Just the kind of low-grade gray feeling that no amount of Bollywood playlists could shift. I'd put on "Tum Hi Ho" and even Arijit couldn't reach me.
So I did the only sensible thing. I went downstairs to my bodega on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, the one where the guy behind the counter calls me "boss" and remembers I don't take it spicy.
A bacon-egg-and-cheese on a roll, salt pepper ketchup, wrapped in foil, four dollars. There is no chef in Manhattan who has ever made me as happy as that foil-wrapped bodega egg sandwich on a sad Saturday.
I ate it walking, which is the only correct way. Down 125th, past the church letting out, past the man selling incense and shea butter who told me to have a blessed day and I genuinely did after that.
This is the part of New York the postcards skip. Not the skyline. The bodega egg sandwich. The cat sleeping on a stack of newspapers. The guy who knows your order. The way a four-dollar breakfast on a Harlem morning can recalibrate your entire nervous system.
My mom would be horrified. "You ate bacon on the street?" Yes, Ba. And I felt born again.
I walked all the way to Marcus Garvey Park and sat on a bench and watched two kids fight over a scooter, and the gray feeling was just gone. Evaporated into the foil.
New York doesn't fix you with grand gestures. It fixes you with a bodega egg sandwich and a stranger telling you to have a blessed day.
Some mornings, four dollars is all the therapy you need.
Love,