There is a woman on 68th and Lexington who sells nectarines out of a cart, and I am, without exaggeration, obsessed with her.
I catch the 6 train at 7AM most mornings now, which feels like a personality flaw I have chosen to develop. The platform at 68th is already thick with heat by then. July in New York does not negotiate.
She stacks the nectarines in this perfect pyramid. Three for two dollars. I hand her exact change every time because I saw a man once try to pay with a twenty and the look she gave him could have curdled milk.
"You," she said to me last week, pointing. "Every day now." And I felt more seen than I have by most men I've dated.
The 6 train at 7AM is its own little country. The nurses coming off night shifts. The finance boys with AirPods and no soul. One older uncle who reads a Gujarati newspaper and I want so badly to talk to him but I never do. He reminds me of my nana folding the Sandesh at the dining table in Ahmedabad.
I eat the nectarine somewhere around 51st, juice running down my wrist, trying not to look like a raccoon in a linen blazer. I usually fail.
The 6 train at 7AM has taught me that routine is not the enemy of a good life. Back home I thought routine meant giving up. Here it means I have built something. A cart, a train, a woman who remembers my face.
I moved to this city thinking I needed to be surprised every day to feel alive. Turns out I just needed a nectarine and someone to point at me and say, you, every day now.
Same time tomorrow, same pyramid.
Love,