It hit 98 degrees today and New York became a different city. The kind where you plan your entire route around which stores have the door propped open, blasting AC out onto the sidewalk like a gift.
I was on the Lower East Side, came up from the F at Delancey-Essex, and immediately regretted every fabric decision I'd made that morning. Linen is a lie. Linen does nothing.
The heatwave in NYC is its own genre of suffering. The subway platform is a sauna, but the train car is arctic. You spend the whole day whiplashing between climates. My mother in Ahmedabad, where 40 degrees Celsius is a Tuesday, would find all of us dramatic. She would be right.
I ducked into the bodega on Suffolk Street mostly for the cold, and there he was — the orange bodega cat, sprawled across the counter directly under the AC vent like he owned the deed. Smartest man in the building. I told him so. He blinked at me slowly, which I took as agreement.
I got an iced chai from the little Bangladeshi spot around the corner, the real kind, cardamom and everything, and pressed the cold cup to my neck the whole walk to Seward Park.
Seward Park in a heatwave is all shade real estate. Every bench under a tree is claimed. Old men playing chess who refuse to acknowledge the temperature. Kids in the sprinkler. A guy asleep with a newspaper over his face like it's 1974.
I sat on the one sliver of shade I could find and did nothing for an hour. Just watched the LES melt and reassemble itself. Surviving a heatwave here isn't about staying cool. It's about surrendering to being warm and finding the small mercies — a cat, a cold cup, a patch of shade.
The city is hard to love at 98 degrees. I love it anyway.
Love,