One Day Late: August 8th

New York broke today.

Last night, I woke once, twice, thrice to the sound of violent thunder. Never in California have I heard real thunder — the kind that precipitates a storm worthy of dismay; this is the first I’ve been woken by it.

This morning, I make the muggy 20-minute commute to work on foot, as per usual. But uptown, my friends and coworkers with downtown destinations are above ground as well, retreating to pavement when the rails fail. Jules journeys 50 blocks south before boarding a bus. One of my interns arrives an hour and a half late. It is humid, unbearably so, and Manhattan is flooded with the kind of traffic I’m more used to seeing in Los Angeles.

On my way to picking up lunch at the Calexico cart on Wooster and Prince Street, I call JB to express my irritation.

“Do you ever get the feeling that you … need a cigarette? And everything will feel better?”

“Yeah, I know exactly what you mean,” he says.

I’m not a smoker. But this summer, nicotine has become a bigger part of my diet than water. The heat is compounding my already existing frustration with the trains. I just want to go home.

But by home, I don’t quite mean California. I mean my apartment on 10th Street and Avenue A, right by the park and footsteps from St. Marks. As exasperating as the weather is, I know it’s part of living in New York.

I glance at the cars and trucks and taxis inching down Houston with windows down and their drivers’ hands on horns. There are even more pedestrians than during the usual lunch hour in SoHo with its techies and worker bees and tourists and food carts. Today, the cabs are full, the trains halted, and we are all above ground and equal — each person as much at the mercy of the sun as the next. Equal.

New York — in spite of its disparate neighborhoods and cliques and cultures — is astonishingly diverse, more so than the other big cities I’ve spent my life in. San Francisco and Los Angeles and Boston make it far too easy to isolate oneself among the familiar. Here, dealing with different people is unavoidable. I take it for granted. But this afternoon, I marvel at the palette of skin colors before me, at the odd co-mingling of gold-handled leather purses and dingy blue-and-red-striped plastic totes, at the man hocking $1 bottles of Poland Spring alongside the young, freckled schoolgirl examining a street vendor’s wares, and at the sheer number of people headed toward different lives in the same direction, sometimes on the same block.

“Only in this city,” I tell myself and I am not entirely sure whether I am referring to the people who call this island home or the ridiculousness of their stranded state today. I rip open the foil paper of my pulled pork taco. Its smoky, sweet scent is a tease; I can’t eat this on the street. I would look ridiculous scarfing down a food cart lunch in my fuchsia dress and cream patent leather flats, a black Kate Spade purse balancing precariously off one shoulder. I head toward my office, beads of sweat glistening from the hairline above my forehead. The entire way back, I anticipate the tang of pork sauce on my tongue and the texture of soft, warm tortilla pulled apart piece by piece by my fingers.