Dear Mayor Mamdani,

This is my New York City battle cry.

Dear Mayor Mamdani,

I love you. I know that’s odd seeing as we’ve never met. To be fair I did almost meet you last summer at a fundraiser that the mother of a close friend hosted on the upper west side before the primary, but you had to leave. You were busy, I get it. Just being in your presence was more than enough. You spoke about the New York I know. The one you want to bring back. Your political voice was the first to strike the chord in my gut that tells me I’ve heard something true. Even President Obama, whose tongue sprang hope in the same tune of a nightingale, did not stir such an awakening in my soul the way you did. You feel like the friends I grew up with. The people who raised me alongside the streets of this filthy beast of a city. I love those friends more than most people. I love this city like she is my cousin-sister, I know you do too. I wanted you to know that I see you. I also have to ask you something about the subway.

My cortisol levels rise as soon as I step on the train and it has nothing to do with safety. The diabolical delays, logic-confounding weekend route changes, and crumbling stations don’t phase me. Is there a drug and mental health crisis spreading through the streets and finding its way underground? Of course. Transplants of today didn’t live in the city of the 80s and 90s. The one where my mother, 23 and pregnant, waddled to and from her fifth floor walk up in the east village past the armed man standing guard at the door of the apartment where a tenant had begun dealing crack. They didn’t lay in her womb as she stepped onto the subway and breathed a sigh of relief to see the red beret of a guardian angel. Violence and homelessness are crises of the subway that have always been here and I have faith that in your New York, Mayor Mamdani, the resources that run through the veins of this city will be repurposed toward progressive social services and support.

My concern is not within the realm of a necessary shift from capitalist mindset to democratic socialist policy. I know that is where your focus lies. I know that is what guides your political practice. This is not about that. What I am wondering is if you have been on the subway recently and noticed anything strange? I suppose I need to be more specific. That question, laid bare, likely has a multitude of answers. Let me explain. In my youth, when a group of friends and I entered the subway, people let out audible groans. They yelled at our pulsating mass of hormones when we got too rowdy. We were a disturbance and we knew it. We soaked in the temporary power we had over the public transit and those who crossed our paths. You remember, don’t you? The way we didn’t care if people were tired. How we didn’t care if we were obnoxious. How we were too in love with each other to consider what anyone who didn’t exist in our immediate orbit thought.

It sounds terrible in writing, doesn’t it? The inherent selfish nature of how we behaved, but that is the point of teenagers. That was how we got here, isn’t it? That selfishness pushed us to dream loud. To watch the stations pass by and consider what might happen if we stayed a bit longer, so we could walk the streets past homes we dreamed of seeing inside. We took the subway and the world opened up.

I feel like you will understand what I mean when I say that youths are meant to swing around the poles to make each other laugh. They should be standing on the seats and cheering for the showtime boyz. Rather than copying an AI generated essay, they should be rushing to finish their homework on a makeshift lap desk made from a backpack with their notebooks on top. They should be leaning against the crook of a friend’s arm that rests over their shoulder. They should be sat beside one another, earbuds split between them, foreheads leaned forward so close their baby hairs touch. They should be bopping their chins ever-so-slightly to the same beat; even when they are not talking, they should be in sync.

So that’s why I was wondering, Mayor Mamdani, have you seen the youths now? Have you seen them on subways? They are silent, heads down, watching videos on their phones. When I step onto the subway, I will the young people around me to joke or to yell or to pinch each other a little too hard because they want their crush to feel the difference. I pray for a giggle or a look, the kind that comes before a big confession. The type that makes their belly tighten before they regurgitate it out. I look for the girl who was broken up with on the express, before she transferred to the local so she would have more time to cry before her stop. I search for them living the way they are supposed to on the subway. The way we did, back then.

But I don’t see them, do you?

I just see phones. I see spirits numbed by the algorithm. I see social isolation in the name of viral recognition. I see a lack of friendship. The lack of emotional output beyond a take for the screen. I see teens stone faced, soul sucked, and it scares me.

Do you remember rushing down the stairs to the platform and holding the train doors open so everyone could pile in just before it pulled out? Hair still smelling like incense and marijuana, a CD freshly burnt off Napster ready to play on the walkman. No one was watching us so instead, we chose to be together, and we stayed that way on the subway until we got to wherever it was that we were going.

I was wondering, Mayor Mamdani, did you ever have a subway love story? I did, a few. Once I was hanging out under the globe at Columbus Circle when a boy I’d never met sent his friend over to tell me he thought I was cute. I sent the same message back and then he invited me to join him down at the bottom of the stairs of the station. The part before the turnstiles, the in-between of inside and out. We kissed there for hours. When I find myself back there now, I can still see my shadow stuck to the tiled wall where he leaned against me and I pulled him closer.

One time there was another boy I liked and I decided to ask him out. I had no money. I had never been on a date, so I devised a plan to invite him to ride the shuttle to and from Times Square to Grand Central. I imagined we would sit there for hours, in that little two seater across from the conductors door. A first class seat for the price of one green DOE Metrocard swipe. Hypnotized by the back and forth of it all, I knew we would unlock each other’s secrets. I think we did three loops before we ran out of things to say and he left, back to Brooklyn. I rode the shuttle for another hour on my own, hoping the hypnosis would cure my broken heart.

I saw you took the subway to your wedding. Congratulations! You both looked beautiful. I took the subway on my wedding day too, after we kissed at City Hall and crowded into the train with the friends who could take the day off work and our parents and immediate families. We went to a dive bar where we ate pizza and chicken wings. My wedding day remains the perfect NYC dream. My favorite photos from that day were taken underground.

Mayor Mamdani, you are still wading through your early thirties, I love that for you. I love it for New York. You are in the beginning of the stretching. The growth that comes in tiny spurts, which you won’t notice until you get to where I am and realize you have reached almost-forty. Now, the amount of life behind me is significant enough to be nostalgic about. Motherhood, it seems, does that as well. Much has been said by way of ‘the Millennial’. There is an even smaller cohort of the elder portion of the generation of which I am a proud member. Those of us who became young adults just as the smart phone entered the chat. There was TV, of course, and video games and computer games. We had screens and distractions, of course, of course. We survived technology booming in our lifetime, we are watching it happen in a terrifying way again now, but I believe this city we love will grow with you. We will continue to stretch. I believe in you the way I believed the bad poems I wrote on the subway made me a writer. It was true. You are true, too.

I think you will understand when I say that I have always been a New York, New Yorker. The, never been behind the wheel of a car, latch-key, got 212 tattooed on my arm before I moved away for a few years just so people would know, kind. I moved back to New York with the New Yorker I married as soon as we got pregnant. I dream for my kids a beautifully degenerate New York childhood but I have been worried that no longer exists. I have been worried that the kids no longer understand what it means to gather and be. That’s why I am writing you, because I see what you have been doing for us. I see the way you have prioritized community. You know the power of a crowd. I hope you know we are an army. We want to rise. We need you to continue to scream about the strength in uncovering common ground.

Mayor Mamdani, I believe you understand what makes this city great is walking onto the subway and feeling dread that school just let out and raucous teens abound. You know more than anyone the way this city forces those of us with a spark inside to be dynamic. You know we can’t do it alone. You know how quickly that spark can go out if it isn’t fanned by the love of our people. I worry the youths won’t find their people. I worry about what they are missing because they aren’t looking up on the subway.

I know you are busy, but I’m wondering, could you keep an eye out next time you catch a train? Perhaps you will come across a semi-circle of young people who forgot about their phones and missed their stop, lost in a rap cypher. Or maybe a few friends huddled and talking shit about the teacher who won’t get off their back. Or the kids orchestrating the chorus to a musical they are working on, still figuring out the harmony. Maybe you will catch the eye of a lonely boy and offer a smile, so he has the courage to do the same for someone else.

Thank you, Mayor Mamdani. I don’t know you but I know you, you know? I can tell you’re a real one. Stay safe. We gotchu.

Love,

Natasha