The 2 train stopped at 96th Street this morning and just sat there. Doors open. No announcement. That specific August silence where everyone pretends they're not sweating through their shirts.
Old me would have panicked. Would have pulled up the map, considered running upstairs to catch the 1, calculated exactly how many minutes late this made me.
New me just leaned against the pole and let it happen.
There's something about the 2 train in summer. The way the platform at 96th holds heat like a tandoor. The way the local pulls in across the platform, taunting you, and you have to decide in half a second whether to be loyal to your express.
I used to treat every commute like a chase scene from a Salman Khan film. All urgency, no plot. Sprinting up the stairs at Chambers, weaving through tourists in Union Square, arriving at work already exhausted before 9am.
But this summer I decided to stop rushing. Not as some grand wellness thing. I'm not doing sunrise journaling in Central Park. I just got tired.
So when the 2 train sat there at 96th, I looked around instead. A man reading an actual paperback. Two kids arguing about whether the Mets were doomed. A woman with a bag of mangoes from the fruit cart upstairs, the smell cutting through the AC-less car, and suddenly I was eight years old in Ahmedabad, my Nani slicing Alphonsos over the sink.
The train lurched forward eventually. It always does.
I got to work eleven minutes late and nobody died. Nobody even noticed. All that panic I've been carrying for years, and the world just kept spinning without my urgency.
Maybe the 2 train at 96th knew something I didn't. That the delay wasn't the problem. My relationship to it was.
I'm learning that this city rewards the people who slow down just enough to see it.
Let the train be late. You'll get there.
Love,