I felt it before I saw it. That first cold morning on the 1 train, when the doors opened at 137th and the platform breathed a chill straight into my collar.
September does this. It lets you get comfortable in your linen, lets you believe summer is still around, and then one Tuesday it just decides. No warning. No text.
I was underdressed, obviously. A thin cardigan I'd thrown on like a lie. Everyone else on the 1 train looked like they'd checked a weather app like functioning adults. I stood there hugging myself between a man reading a paperback and a girl in a puffer already, in September, the overachiever.
The first cold morning always makes me miss Ahmedabad in the strangest way. Not the heat, which I do not miss, but the way winter there is gentle and social. Everyone out on terraces. Peanuts and gajak and my mother yelling that I'll catch a cold if I don't cover my ears.
Here, nobody yells about my ears. Here I have to remember my own ears.
I got off at Christopher Street and ducked into the bodega on the corner for a chai, and the cat was asleep on the newspapers as always. The man behind the counter said, cold today, ha? and I said ha, like we were old friends discussing weather across a village well.
The first cup of proper hot chai after the first cold morning hits different. I held it with both hands the whole walk down Bleecker.
The city changes its whole face in a single week. The summer people leave. The scarves come out. The parks go gold at the edges.
I am not ready and I am completely ready. Both. Always both.
Go dig out your warm socks. It's coming for you too.
Love,