The first real heat of June showed up on a Tuesday with no warning, like an aunty who said she'd come for chai and stayed for dinner.
I was walking up Broadway near 137th, sweating through a linen shirt I'd convinced myself was "breathable," when I saw them. A crate of Alphonso mangoes outside a fruit stand. Six dollars for four. The good kind. The kind that smell like Ahmedabad in May.
I bought them without thinking. Then I did the thing I swore I'd never do as a New Yorker with standards — I ate one on the 1 train platform at 137th, juice running down my wrist, while a man with a Bluetooth speaker played bachata.
The first real heat of June does something to me. It collapses the distance between here and home. Suddenly I'm nine years old again, standing over the kitchen sink while my Ba cuts a mango into a hedgehog and tells me to eat fast before it gets warm.
The 1 train uptown in summer is its own kind of country. The cars get hot and intimate. Everyone's a little sticky, a little softer. A kid was crying about a popsicle. Two girls were doing each other's makeup off a phone screen. Nobody was performing. We were all just surviving the same heat.
I got off at 116th and the platform smelled like warm steel and someone's cologne and, faintly, my own mango hands.
This is the thing about the first real heat of June in this city. It's gross. The garbage announces itself. The subway grates breathe like dragons. And yet I find myself absurdly, embarrassingly happy.
Because summer here means stoops full of people. It means the Mister Softee jingle haunting your dreams. It means I can wear one layer and pretend I'm effortless.
I saved three mangoes for the weekend. They're sitting in a bowl on my windowsill in Harlem, ripening, perfuming the whole apartment.
Some days the city gives you exactly what you didn't know you needed for six dollars.
Eat the mango on the platform. Nobody's watching, and if they are, they're jealous.
Love,