I felt it before I saw it. That first crisp morning on the 2 train, somewhere past 96th Street, when the doors opened at each stop and let in air that wasn't soupy and desperate anymore.
September in New York doesn't announce itself. It just slips in one Tuesday and the guy selling churros outside the station is suddenly wearing a hoodie.
The 2 train to Harlem is my favorite stretch of my week. It's loud and honest and nobody's performing. A woman across from me was eating a bacon-egg-and-cheese with the focus of a surgeon. I respected it deeply.
I got off at 116th and walked past the fruit stands where the mangoes are never as good as home but I buy them anyway, out of loyalty to a feeling. Amma would laugh. She'd say, "You crossed an ocean to eat a bad mango."
Maybe I did.
But there's something about the 2 train to Harlem in fall that makes the bad mango worth it. The light on Lenox turns gold around 8am. The barbershops open their gates. A man was playing old Motown from a speaker and an auntie in a headwrap was doing a tiny shoulder dance while she waited for the light.
I love this city most when it's not trying. When it's just brownstones and steam and the smell of somebody's incense drifting out a third-floor window.
I stood on the corner of 116th too long, being late for no reason, letting the season arrive.
Winter will come and I will complain. Summer will return and I will complain. But this narrow week of September, riding the 2 train to Harlem with cold hands and a warm chest — this I will never complain about.
Fall found me on the uptown platform. I let it.
Love,