There's a specific loneliness that finds you at a party where everyone is having fun.
I was on a rooftop in DUMBO on Saturday, the Manhattan Bridge framed perfectly behind everyone's heads like a screensaver. My friend Naina hosts these things beautifully — string lights, a playlist that goes from Frank Ocean to Arijit Singh without flinching, natural wine in mismatched glasses.
And somewhere around the second hour, with the F train rumbling over the bridge, the homesickness arrived. It always comes uninvited and dressed for the occasion.
So I slipped to the corner of the roof, near the water tank, and I called my Ba. It was already morning in Ahmedabad. She picked up on the second ring, the way she always does, like she'd been holding the phone.
"Beta, you ate?" First question. Always.
I didn't tell her I was at a party. I just said I was looking at a bridge and thinking of her. She told me the gulmohar tree outside our house is in full bloom, red everywhere, and that Papa fixed the squeaky gate finally after eleven years.
Homesickness is a strange tenant. It doesn't pay rent and it never leaves, it just goes quiet sometimes. I've lived in New York three years now. I love it like a person. But love for a place doesn't cancel out love for another place. They just sit in you side by side, two roommates who don't speak.
From that DUMBO rooftop I could see the whole glittering thing — the city I chose, the life I'm building, the friends laughing fifteen feet away. And on the phone, the city that made me, with its gulmohar trees and squeaky gates and a woman asking if I'd eaten.
I cried a little. Quietly. The good kind, the kind that empties something out so you can refill it.
Naina found me eventually and didn't ask why my eyes were wet. She just handed me a glass and put her head on my shoulder and we watched a train cross the bridge.
That's friendship, I think. Someone who lets you have your homesickness without explaining it.
I went back to the party softer than I left it.
You can love two places at once. Nobody tells you it'll ache this sweetly.
Love,