It was ninety-eight degrees on Thursday and New York in a heatwave becomes a different city entirely. Meaner. Slower. Everyone glistening and refusing to make eye contact, which is somehow more intimate than eye contact.
I was on the J train platform at Essex-Delancey, which if you don't know it is one of those elevated-adjacent stations where the heat pools like soup. The platform fan was broken. Of course it was. The fan is always broken during the one week you'd sell a kidney for it.
I was melting. My linen shirt, which I had chosen specifically to be breezy and chic, had betrayed me and was now doing an impression of a wet paper towel.
And then a man, older, maybe sixties, standing next to me, opened a black umbrella. Not because it was raining. There wasn't a cloud. He opened it for shade and then, without a single word, angled it so half of it covered me too.
We stood there. Two strangers under one umbrella on the J train platform in a heatwave. He didn't try to talk to me. He just shared his shade like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
This is the New York nobody puts in the movies. Not the skyline. This. A heatwave stripping everyone down to their most tired selves and someone deciding to be kind anyway.
When the J finally came he folded the umbrella, nodded, and got into a different car. I never learned his name. I think about him constantly now.
The heatwave broke by Friday. The city forgave itself, like it always does.
But I keep an umbrella in my bag now. Not for rain. For someone else's ninety-eight-degree Thursday.
Be the umbrella on the platform. That's the whole assignment.
Love,