My AC gave up on Tuesday night. Just wheezed once, dramatically, like a Bollywood heroine in her final scene, and died.
So here I am. 4AM. Astoria fire escape. My legs dangling over 31st Street, a bowl of watermelon going warm beside me because even the fridge feels tired in this heat.
The N train rattles by on the elevated tracks every few minutes. I used to hate that sound when I first moved here. Now it's a lullaby I can't sleep without, which is its own kind of joke tonight.
Here's what I've learned about an Astoria fire escape at 4AM. The souvlaki place on the corner turns its lights off but the smell stays. A man walks his dog in a Knicks jersey and nods at me like this is normal, two strangers awake in a heat wave. It kind of is.
Back home in Ahmedabad, the summers were worse. Much worse. But Ma would drag the mattresses to the terrace and we'd all sleep under the sky, the whole building doing the same, everyone pretending they couldn't hear everyone else. A city sleeping outside itself.
I don't have a terrace here. I have a fire escape barely wide enough for my hips and a questionable sense of self-preservation.
But the sky is the same trick. If you look up past the water towers, past the wires, there's a little strip of it turning grey-pink now. Morning arriving whether I slept or not.
The heat in this city is a personality. It seeps into the subway platforms and turns the L train into a tandoor. It makes everyone move slower, meaner, then somehow kinder by evening when the light goes gold.
An Astoria fire escape at 4AM is not where I planned to be at 24. But my rent is paid, my watermelon is warm, and the N train keeps me company like an old friend who talks too much.
The repair guy comes Friday. Until then, I am a woman of the terrace, minus the terrace.
Some nights the city just wants you awake to see it.
Love,