Nobody warns you that the A train, if you ride it far enough north, basically delivers you to a different planet. This Sunday I took it all the way up to Fort Tryon Park in Washington Heights and the city got quiet in a way I forgot it could.
I went alone, on purpose. I've been so surrounded by people lately — roommates, coworkers, the permanent crowd of the L train — that I was starting to feel like a stranger to myself.
Fort Tryon Park in October is almost unfair. The leaves are turning. The Hudson sits there all wide and silver below you. You can see the Palisades across the water and it doesn't feel like New York at all. It feels like someone's gentle idea of New York.
There were a few old couples walking slow, a man doing tai chi, a woman reading on a bench with her dog. Everyone had agreed, silently, to not be in a hurry. I sat down and did nothing for a full twenty minutes, which for me is practically a spiritual achievement.
I bought a coffee from a cart near the entrance and climbed up toward the Cloisters. I didn't go in. I just wanted to sit near something old and solid while my own life feels so uncertain and new.
The thing about living in a loud city is that you forget quiet is also available. It's just further up the A train than you want to go. Fort Tryon Park is a forty-minute reminder that stillness exists if you're willing to travel for it.
A little girl ran past me chasing pigeons, laughing, her dupatta-like scarf trailing behind her, and for a second I was seven years old in a garden in Ahmedabad and I had to blink hard.
I went back down to the train eventually, back to the noise, back to the week. But I carried the quiet with me like a stone in my pocket.
Sometimes the best thing you can do in this city is leave the part of it you live in.
Love,