The 6 train at 8AM is a specific kind of quiet. Not empty — never empty — but everyone is too warm and too early to perform anything. We just stand there, swaying, staring at nothing.
I have a ritual now. Before I even swipe in at 77th Street, I stop at the bodega on Lexington where the man behind the counter has stopped asking and just starts making my iced coffee the second he sees me. Extra ice. A little too sweet. Four dollars I pretend I don't count.
My mother used to make me chai every single morning in Ahmedabad. She'd press the glass into my hand while I was still half-asleep, still arguing about something. I didn't know that was love until it was a bodega guy in a city that doesn't know my last name.
The 6 train commute is fifteen minutes if the MTA is feeling generous, twenty-five if it's not. I've learned to read the crowd. If people are sighing louder than usual, we're stuck. If a saxophone starts up at Union Square, we're fine.
August in New York is a heatwave that lives in your clothes. By the time I get to my stop the iced coffee is already sweating through the cup and so am I. But there's something holy about the routine of it. Same train. Same ice. Same tired strangers.
I used to think I'd feel like a real New Yorker when I got a fancy apartment or stopped flinching at rats. Turns out it was this. The 6 train at 8AM, a coffee that knows my name before anyone here does.
Some mornings the whole city is a stranger. Some mornings it's just my stop, arriving.
Love,