I couldn't sleep, so I did the thing I always promise myself I'll do more and never actually do. I walked the Brooklyn Bridge at 6am.
If you've only ever done the Brooklyn Bridge at noon, elbowing through selfie sticks and e-bikes and a man dressed as the Statue of Liberty, I need you to understand it's a completely different structure before the sun is fully up.
At 6am it's yours. Just you, a handful of runners, an old man doing tai chi near the Brooklyn tower, and the pigeons who own the place.
I started from the DUMBO side because I'd been up in the neighborhood getting the world's earliest bagel. The sky was doing this soft peach-into-gray thing over the water, and the sun came up behind me as I walked toward Manhattan, lighting up all the windows one by one like someone flicking on a city.
Walking the Brooklyn Bridge at that hour, I felt like I'd gotten away with something. Like I'd been let in on a secret the eight million other people were sleeping through.
There's a scene in Kal Ho Naa Ho on the Brooklyn Bridge and I used to watch it in Ahmedabad on my laptop, aching to be here. Twenty-four-year-old me is now the girl on the actual bridge, in a coat that cost twelve dollars, slightly cold, completely alone, completely happy.
I stopped in the middle and just stood there. The cables make this cathedral feeling above you if you look up. A runner nodded at me. A seagull screamed about something. The water below was that deep steel color it only gets in October.
I didn't take a single photo until I was almost at the Manhattan side, and even then just one, badly framed, blurry, perfect.
New York has a way of being impossible and unbearable and then, for twenty minutes on an empty bridge at dawn, giving you exactly what you came here for.
The secret is just waking up before the city does.
Set the alarm. The bridge is waiting.
Love,