The 6 train at 7am is a specific kind of church.
Nobody talks. Everybody sways. A man near the door is doing the Wordle with his thumb hovering like he's defusing a bomb. I love him for it.
I've started making my chai the night before now, because mornings in this apartment are a war I keep losing. So I pour it into a thermos, and by the time I'm underground at 77th Street it's gone lukewarm, which is somehow worse than cold and better than nothing.
My mummy would be horrified. She believes chai is only chai when it's scalding, made fresh, the ginger pounded not sliced. She's right. She's always right. But she's also 7,000 miles away in Ahmedabad and I am here, sipping sad thermos chai between 68th and 59th, so we compromise with the universe.
The 6 train commute is the one part of my day nobody can email me during. That's the secret. It's not that I love the crush of bodies or the guy whose backpack keeps colonizing my ribcage. It's that for eleven minutes, I'm unreachable.
I used to fill those minutes with a podcast, then a playlist, then doomscrolling. Now I just look. A teenager in Astoria-bound sneakers, laces undone with intention. Two nurses in scrubs sharing one AirPod each. An auntie clutching a plastic bag from a store that closed in 2019.
We get off at Union Square in one exhale, this whole car of strangers, and scatter into our separate ambitions. I climb the stairs at 14th Street and the city hits me all at once, hot and loud and mine.
I finish my lukewarm chai on the corner before I walk into work. It tastes like a small apology to myself.
Some mornings you don't need it to be perfect. You just need it to be warm enough.
Love,