The sky over the Lower East Side turned the color of a charging phone at 4% and I had about ninety seconds to find shelter.
I did not find shelter. The June thunderstorm found me first.
I'd been walking down Delancey, half-heartedly looking for a vintage place I'd seen on someone's story, when the rain came down like the city had been holding it in all week. Within a block I was the kind of wet you can't recover from. The pretty-rain fantasy where you twirl like in a movie song? Gone in seconds. This was just regular wet.
So I did what everyone does. I ran under the Williamsburg Bridge.
And there, in that concrete underpass where the J train rumbles overhead, were maybe twenty other people who'd had the exact same idea. A delivery guy with his bike. Two NYU kids sharing one tiny umbrella very badly. An older man with a folding chair, as if he'd known. A woman holding a bodega bag over her blowout.
Nobody talked at first. Then the J train went over and the whole underpass shook and someone laughed, and that broke it.
This is the secret superpower of a June thunderstorm: it makes New Yorkers temporarily nice to each other. The man with the chair offered it to the woman protecting her blowout. The NYU kids gave up on the umbrella and just accepted their fate. I shared a samosa I'd grabbed from a deli on Essex with a stranger because what else do you do.
We waited out the whole storm like that, under the Williamsburg Bridge, a little congregation of the soaked. Twenty minutes. The kind of twenty minutes you don't get back and don't really want to.
Then the rain thinned, the sky went that washed-clean blue, and we all scattered like nothing had happened. No goodbyes. Just people who'd shared a roof made of bridge for a little while.
My white sneakers are ruined. Completely, permanently grey. Worth it.
The city is most kind, I think, when it's raining and we have nowhere else to be.
Love,