12:00am It’s pouring in New York City. Curtains and curtains of rain in the darkness with speckles of light. Apocalyptic streets with the occasional yellow cab and barely any human alive. We are all drenched after dashing out from shelter in Central Park and scuttling up the restaurant’s shuttle. And then in a state of utter confusion, five of us got off from the bus and disappeared into the wet swamp of New York’s night.
12:21am I’m home.
2:08-2:20am Somewhere between these timestamps, I fall asleep.
6:50am My alarm goes off. I need to get up for work because Fareed Zakaria GPS is having a live show. Am so tired I can barely open my eyes. My hand reaches out towards the plush floor chair, pats around, and locates the vibrating phone. Swiftly, the finger hits snooze.
7:04am Bleary-eyed, I stare at my phone. The executive producer has sent out an email that the show is preempted as CNN covers deadly shootings. My first instinct is to go back to sleep but I start reading the news. And then it’s impossible to go back to sleep because on days like this, I just feel suddenly grateful to be alive. In one week, America had 4 deadly shootings: 3 people were shot and killed at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California on Monday, 2 employees were fatally shot at a Walmart store in Mississippi on Tuesday, 20 people were killed on Saturday morning at another Walmart in El Paso on Saturday morning, and in less than thirteen hours after, another 9 people were killed in Ohio. The fragility of life, the unpredictability of mass violence, America’s love-hate relationship with its guns, and just the thought of one of my loved ones being in these situations makes me tremble with fear… I’m just not quite sure fear of what—of the heartbreaking tragedy of death, of the blinding hatred that pushes these shooters to kill innocents, of the unpredictable and almost cruel odds of living, of a country that mourns again and again but does not change anything. And maybe it’s all of these things, along with the smallness of my own matters (like waking up) brought starkly into ironic relief. I text my friend who is also awake.
9:08am We Facetime. Marwah and I literally talk for TWO HOURS AND TWENTY MINUTES. We’ve both barely woken up—I’m wearing an eye-mask like a bandana, she’s crunching on cereal. It starts to feel like a footloose, fancy-free kind of day.
11:47am I start making breakfast. The electric kettle has malfunctioned since a week ago, so I boil water in a pot. It takes forever and I lean against the wall, reading Franny and Zooey—it’s a slim book but I’ve only been reading it whenever I wait for the water to boil and progress is slow. The book is so on-point and so pretentious that it’s funny—it tickles the profound, but I’m not done yet, so who knows?
3:03pm I finish feeding myself and doing laundry. Realize that this is THE last weekend I have in New York this summer. Decide that I should get out of the house.
3:43pm I finish drying my hair. A colleague has recommended Basquiat’s “Defacement”: The Untold Story at the Guggenheim (which I’ve never been to), and so I’m off.
4:15pm The car cruises up Fifth Avenue. The world keeps turning. People die and people live. Life goes on.
4:20pm I arrive at the Guggenheim, which is full of exterior and interior curves. The walk is a continuous spiral up six stories to the dome (no more zig-zagging museum corridors and labyrinthine galleries).
5:40pm The museum closes.
6:38pm I arrive in Chinatown to meet Mingsi. We eat BBQ pork and roast chicken which makes me fervently lust for Singapore’s char siew rice. Half of the sky is sunny and blue, the other half is grey and menacing. The weather just can’t decide.
7:30pm We talk about what’s going on in Hong Kong while strolling towards the Brooklyn Bridge. Soon we coalesce into the stream of people (mostly tourists) who are swarming onto the magnificent overpass. The sky above is lilac and cotton-candy pink. There’s the smell of sea salt and car exhaust fumes.
8:08pm The sun sinks. The crowd thins at one point. And then it starts pouring again, and I’m all wet—the second day in a row. We are shivering and dripping and chattering nonstop about Moulin Rouge (me, gushing; her, analyzing it from the A&R/music business perspective).
8:52pm We are cold and still damp, but bubble tea beckons. In the washed-out light, under three cute skull drawings, we sip peach oolong tea and slurp herbal jelly. I somehow know every single song the store is playing and we are the only customers, so I sing to the chorus and the night feels cold at the fingertips but warm inside—and I know I’ve said this, but I’m just thankful for these pulsing, animate moments today.
10:33pm I am actually getting pretty good at taking the New York subway right when I’m about to say goodbye to New York. How do I know I’m getting better? Because I actually get home with NO MISHAPS (or wasted dollars).
11:58pm Jump onto my bed fresh out of the shower.
12:03am Write about a New York Sunday on a New York Monday.
Praying, and with love,
