In the city, everything feels boxed in. You live in a rectangle, sleep in one, and move through a grid of them all day. There’s little room for softness or fresh air. I had the simple urge to open a window, just to let the room breathe, the way Germans insist on airing out their flats. I sat inside, in my little cube of recirculated air.
There I was, in my Hamilton Heights three-month sublet, anxiously attempting to jolt my tiny window open. I suppose I figured my AC unit was trapped within and submerged by a cage, but the thought didn’t even enter my mind. Within seconds, I watched the unit catapult six-stories to the ground. I physically felt my hand cover my mouth and stepped back in awe, like in a silent film.
Immediately my mind starts racing, and I wonder if my roommates I met one day ago are home. I started googling how many deaths per year are caused by falling AC units. The results are
inconclusive, it’s speculated that the government controls the statistics, or is it just the city? Who counts these things?
People still romanticize New York like it’s 1977, as if the lingering scent of danger and garbage somehow equates to character. But what it really feels like now is a mausoleum, full of people pretending to live. Every corner has become a CVS or a Chase Bank.
I used to think Los Angeles was delusional, and it is—but at least LA is honest about it. There’s no secret about what people are chasing there. Youth. Fame. A recurring role in a Hulu pilot. New York, on the other hand, insists it’s suffering for something noble… some higher creative calling… but mostly it’s just people in overpriced jackets, burning out in public, trying to convince themselves it’s culture.
Everyone is medicated here. Not for pleasure, not for fun, but just to remain vertical. SSRIs, Adderall, beta blockers passed around like favors. You can feel it in the subway: the numbed-out eyes, the slack faces scrolling endlessly through some algorithmic purgatory. Everyone looks like they’re texting from the afterlife.
The night my air conditioner fell six stories to the ground, I had a moment not of fear, but of strange, quiet clarity. I imagined it landing on someone: a finance bro in a vest, a soft-spoken influencer with an apartment tour, someone stumbling home from the Trader Joe’s in the Upper West Side. And the thought didn’t horrify me. It felt… efficient. Like the city was cleaning up after itself.
There’s a cafe in Hamilton Heights called Cocina Consuelo. It’s tucked into the bottom of a building, narrow as a hallway, and small enough that the steam from the kitchen fogs up the windows year-round. I lived three minutes away and went there more often than I should. Erin met me that day. She arrived out of breath, hair slightly damp, sunglasses still on—classic. We squeezed into a corner. All the tables were full.
“What are you getting?” I ask. I picked out this place because I knew it would impress Erin’s exquisite taste. My mind is still racing.
“I think the torta,” Erin says, undecidedly.
“What if I killed someone?” I exclaim, not in panic, but as casually as asking if I should get another coffee.
“Want me to check?” She says to me, half jokingly.
She asked if she could get her torta to go, and the waitress gave her a look, subtle but with edge. I'd forgotten this place had made it onto the New York Times “top eateries” list. Apparently, asking for your sandwich in a box now counts as offensive.
We rushed back to floor number six, taking the stairs due to my occasional, (slightly) irrational fear of elevators. This also applies to ceiling fans. I always assume they are going to fall on me during my sleep.
We entered the apartment, giggling, assumedly annoying my other roommate who is home. Their cat, Milo, is very annoying, but seems to like me a lot, and is adorning every inch of my leg with his scent.
My roommate and Erin exchanged a quick hello and had a quibble over whether Hamilton Heights is a part of Central Harlem or not.
“It is not.” Erin dismisses. (She is right.)
Once inside, Erin, standing taller than me, leaned over the edge of my window to inspect the street below. The scene was calm, undisturbed—no shattered glass, no emergency crews, no sign that an AC unit had just crash-landed six stories.
She pretended to be shocked, then said, “Nothing there. Like nothing happened,” her voice amused and skeptical.
I listened as Erin and my roommate debated quietly, realizing this was the kind of conversation people have to stake their claim on a place—like naming a territory on a map no one else sees. Erin is from Texas, and my roommate is from San Diego.
Hamilton Heights: neither quite West Harlem, nor Central Harlem, a place suspended between lines drawn on a city map and the lives lived in between.
That night, lying in my rectangle bed, I reflected on how the city conceals itself and allows parts of itself to fade unnoticed—like the fallen AC unit, like the disputed borders no one can agree upon.
I didn’t tell anyone it fell. In the city, things become part of the background, quickly forgotten amid the constant hum, like a scream swallowed by the subway’s roar.
New York City: not quite alive, not quite dead.
After I moved out, the roommate who’d arranged the sublet—and who liked to quote Anora at length—demanded I send him $300 for the unit. I had not told him it fell. I suppose I could have, but the moment passed. Accidents happen in New York and then they disappear.
His messages arrived with a clipped certainty, each one angrier than the last. I reminded him the unit had never been secured, that I had replaced it with a new, Amazon-branded fan. He didn’t care. The city does not care. The last text was two words. “Fuck you.”
In the end, I didn’t feel much at all. I understood that the air conditioner, like most things here, had already folded itself into the background. Secrets in New York are not confessions withheld but objects absorbed. Lost, discarded, covered over by the next noise, the next demand. The silence wasn’t cruel. It was structural.
I should have told him, but that’s another tenant’s falling unit to worry about.
