Twenty-Seven Degrees

My second year in that city was the year I learned that loneliness does not always take a shape you can explain to your parents over the phone, or to friends from your hometown, or to the professors who casually ask how you’re doing every day.

I mean, there was nothing wrong with it, literally speaking. No one died, no one left, there was no bullying or disaster I could use as an excuse. It was just... just that the city was too big, and I was too small inside it, and every day felt like repeating the exact same day: waking up in a matchbox-sized rented room, braving the traffic to campus, sitting among dozens of faces where not a single one truly knew me, then coming home in the dark to the same room. I was a child of the diaspora. That phrase sounded gallant at first, a phrase I uttered with a puffed-out chest on the day of my departure, amidst the tearful farewell with my parents. They had to let go of their only child so she could grow up. Back then, I tried to be strong, saying it with a face I forced to look radiant. "I am a wanderer now, you needn't worry about me. I'll be just fine."

And it turned out it wasn't exactly like that. A year later, those words felt like an oversized shirt—something I had to keep wearing even though it no longer fit.

I wasn't sad, if sad means tears. I was just... hollow and cold, constantly, in a way that had nothing to do with the weather. It felt as if one degree inside me had dropped the very first day I arrived in that city, and had never risen again.

I didn't know the exact name for that feeling. Loneliness sounded too simple, while grief felt inaccurate. But whatever its name, it stayed long enough to make me believe that perhaps this was how life would feel from now on.

Perhaps I would have kept believing it, had I not met Mr. Hadi that year.

Mr. Hadi came with an old thermometer that would eventually change the way I looked at many things.

I didn't actually have the money to take a taxi. For an out-of-town student living by counting the leftover cash in her wallet, it was a stupid decision. But there was one route no public transport could reach past midnight—the way home from my part-time job at a copy shop near campus, passing a deserted overpass that was terrifying for a woman walking alone—and on those nights I gave up and hailed a taxi, then ate instant noodles for the next three days to make up for it.

Somehow, more often than coincidence could explain, the one that arrived was Mr. Hadi's taxi. An old cab with a distinct scent—a vanilla air freshener that had long run out but whose smell clung permanently, mixed with coffee and something like eucalyptus oil. And on the dashboard, secured with yellowing tape, was a small glass thermometer. An old thermometer, the kind filled with red liquid inside a tube, the kind mothers used to stick on the walls of children's rooms.

Every time I got in, before starting the car, Mr. Hadi did the exact same thing. He leaned forward, stared at the thermometer, tapped it twice with his fingertip, and announced a number.

"Twenty-four tonight," he said on the first night. He nodded slowly, like someone who had just confirmed something. Then he turned the heater up a bit and tuned the radio to a station playing old songs. "Cold. Be careful not to catch a chill, Miss."

I thought he was just an eccentric old driver. Every city has plenty of people like that—people with strange little habits whom we might encounter once and then immediately forget. I then mumbled a thank you, leaned my head against the glass, and let the city pass outside the window like a movie I wasn't watching.

But the city kept returning me to the same taxi, and gradually those numbers started to feel peculiar.

Because the numbers Mr. Hadi announced, I slowly realized, had nothing to do with the weather. On a sweltering night that made my shirt stick to my skin, he could say, "Twenty-two tonight," while glancing at me through the rearview mirror, and then hand me a small thermos of warm tea without saying much. On a freezing, rainy night, if I happened to have just received a good grade and there was something light in my chest, he could say, "Twenty-nine, warm, this is the good stuff," crack the window a little, and hum along with the radio.

It took me a long time to understand that the number wasn't the air temperature. It was my temperature. Somehow, the old man read something in my face—in the way I got in, the way I answered, in slumped shoulders or a straight back—and translated it into degrees. Then, based on that "temperature," he adjusted everything: the heater, the windows, the music, sometimes deliberately taking a longer route through quiet, beautiful streets when he knew I wasn't ready to go back to my matchbox room, sometimes a packet of ginger candies placed wordlessly on the seat when the number was, as he put it, "very low tonight, Miss, take care of yourself."

He never asked directly if I was okay. Perhaps he knew, the way parents often know, that that question is precisely the hardest one to answer for someone who is not okay. So he asked through the thermometer. How many degrees is it today? And in his strange, silent way, for a few dozen minutes in the middle of a city that didn't care whether I existed or not, I became the only person whose temperature was paid attention to.

It was the warmest thing I experienced all that year. And it came from someone whose name I only learned in the third month, from the ID tag hanging on the dashboard, next to the thermometer.

Then one night, I realized the thermometer was broken. I sat in the front that night—the back seat was full for some reason—and for the first time, I could see the small glass tube up close, under the streetlights passing by one by one. Mr. Hadi tapped it twice, as usual, and said, "Twenty-five tonight." But I stared at the tube, and the red liquid inside wasn't moving. Not at all. The red line stopped at one point, at the number twenty-seven, and that was where it always stopped—I knew, because on subsequent nights I secretly checked it every time, and every time it pointed to the exact same number. Twenty-seven. Always twenty-seven. The thermometer had jammed years ago, probably, and hadn't measured a thing since.

All the numbers Mr. Hadi had announced all this time were made up. There wasn't a single one he had actually read from that glass.

I remember a strange little pang of disappointment that night, a small feeling hard to admit. As if I had just caught a magician hiding a card up his sleeve. All this time I thought there was a kind of small magic in that old taxi—a device that somehow could measure the immeasurable. But there was nothing. Just a broken glass tube and an old man with a habit of tapping it and spouting random numbers. Superstition, I thought. Or not superstition—just a tic, a hollow habit of a driver who had spent too much time alone on the night streets.

I almost stopped paying attention to it after that. But I couldn't, because the problem remained the same: those made-up numbers were accurate. How could something fabricated land so close to what I was actually feeling every single time?

I never asked him about it until the final night.

Because there was a final night, of course. There always is. That year passed, then the next, and slowly the city stopped feeling too big. I found friends, found a rhythm, found the degrees inside me slowly rising again—not because of one big thing that cured it, but because of a thousand small things, and one of them, I believe to this day, was that old taxi smelling of exhausted vanilla. Then I graduated. And on the night before I moved to another city for my first job, I intentionally booked a taxi for a route I didn't need, solely hoping—with a childish hope that made me embarrassed—that the city would, for the very last time, return me to Mr. Hadi.

The city, for the very last time, was kind to me.

He was older now, his hands slower, but the thermometer was still there, still secured by the same aging tape. He tapped it twice. "Twenty-eight," he said, and smiled through the rearview mirror. "Warm. Your face is different, Miss. Good news, huh?"

I told him about my departure. He listened the way old people listen, nodding at the right parts. And as the taxi slowed at the mouth of my alley, before I got out for the last time, I finally asked—the question I had kept for years.

"Sir," I said, "I know, you know, that the thermometer is broken. It’s been pointing at twenty-seven forever. You made up all those numbers, didn't you?"

He didn't look ashamed to be caught. He just smiled, tapped the small glass once more gently, the way one pats an old friend's shoulder.

"Yes, it's broken," he said softly. "Has been for a long time. Used to be my daughter's, when she was little. She got sick easily, her body would get cold so fast. Every night I'd check her temperature with this, afraid of a fever. Now she's grown up, far away—overseas, following her husband. Rarely calls. Busy. It's normal, kids have their own lives." He paused for a moment, and there was something in his voice, not exactly sadness, more like a longing that had made peace with itself. "There is no one left at home whose temperature I need to check."

He tapped the thermometer one more time.

"So I stuck it here. Not to measure the weather—to remind me. Every time someone gets in, I tap this, and then I really look at the person. I ask myself: how many degrees is this person right now. Are they cold. Are they tired. Is there anything that needs warming. I make up the numbers, Miss, that's true—but what I'm reading isn't the glass. What I'm reading is the person. This glass is just so I don't forget to look."

I couldn't say a word. Outside, the city throbbed, cold and indifferent as usual, and for the first time I understood that during my coldest year, there was one person who, every night, decided to truly look at me, and disguised that kindness as an old habit so I wouldn't have to feel pitied.

I got out. I thanked him in a way that felt entirely too small for anything. And as I closed the door, for some reason, perhaps unable to bear the emotion, I said, half-laughing, "You are really something, Sir. Like a superstition, tapping a broken glass."

He shook his head slowly. He looked at me through the open window, with a gaze I will never forget, then tapped his broken thermometer for the very last time, and smiled.

"This is not about superstition."