The 6 train at 8AM in late July is not a place for the weak. It is a place for people who have accepted that their blazer will smell like someone else's back by the time they reach Grand Central.
I boarded at 51st feeling put-together. I exited feeling like a wrung-out dupatta.
But here is the thing about the 6 train at 8AM. It gives you nothing and it gives you everything. This morning a man was reading a paperback with the cover torn off, and a girl in scrubs was asleep standing up, which is a skill I respect deeply.
Before all of this I had stopped at the fruit cart near my building in Astoria, the one on 30th Ave where the uncle-figure — he is not my uncle, but he has uncle energy — sells mangoes in July that are almost, almost Alphonso.
They are not Alphonso. Nothing here is Alphonso. But he wrapped one in newspaper and told me to eat it before it went, and I put it in my tote bag next to my laptop like a fool.
By Astoria Blvd the mango had bruised. By the time I surfaced in Manhattan it had leaked, gently, onto my calendar planner. My whole bag now smells like a Gujarat summer and honestly I am not mad.
My mother used to cut mangoes over the sink so the juice would just go down the drain, standing there in her nightie at 11pm, feeding me pieces off the knife. The 6 train does not know this. But my bag does now.
That is the trade of living here. You lose the sink, the nightie, the knife. You gain a torn-cover paperback, a sleeping stranger, and a mango you have to eat standing up because there is no time to sit.
Some mornings the city takes everything from you before 9am. And some mornings it hands you back a fruit cart uncle who says eat it before it goes.
I ate it at my desk. Over a napkin. It was almost Alphonso.
Eat it before it goes.
Love,