I almost cried on the J train platform this morning, and not for any of the dignified reasons.
I was twelve minutes late, my coffee had betrayed me by going cold, and the elevated tracks at Marcy Avenue were doing that thing where the sun hits you sideways and you can't see your own phone.
Then I smelled it. Mango.
There's a vendor near the Marcy Avenue stairs who sets up a little cart, and this week he had ataulfo mangoes, the small golden ones, sliced into a cup with chili and lime. Five dollars. I handed it over before my brain caught up with my hands.
The Marcy Avenue J train stop is not glamorous. It rattles. The platform shakes when the train comes. But I stood there eating mango with a tiny wooden fork and suddenly I was nine years old on my nani's terrace in Ahmedabad, where mango season meant your fingers stayed sticky until July.
We didn't slice them politely back home. We squeezed the soft ones into pulp and drank them like a dare.
The vendor caught me smiling at nothing and said, "Good na?" and I said good, beta, very good, even though he was probably older than me. He laughed anyway.
The J came. I let it go. I let a whole train go for mango, which is either the most unserious thing I've done all month or the most serious.
New York does this. It will exhaust you on a shaking platform and then hand you the exact thing you didn't know you were homesick for. The Marcy Avenue J train stop will never be in a guidebook, but it gave me June.
I got to work twenty minutes late and told no one why.
Some mornings the mango is the meeting.
Love,