There's a specific hour in New York when the homesickness arrives on schedule. For me it's dusk, when the lights start switching on across the water and the city looks unbearably beautiful and I have nobody next to me to point at it.
I walked the Brooklyn Bridge on Thursday evening, the wooden planks giving that gentle bounce under a thousand strangers' feet. Manhattan behind me going gold. Brooklyn ahead of me going soft.
I called home. It was already the middle of the night in Ahmedabad but my mummy picked up on the second ring because she always does.
"Beta, why are you awake?" she asked, and I said it's evening here, and she laughed because we can never keep the hours straight between us anymore.
Homesickness is a strange thing on the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk. I love this city so much it aches. And I miss home so much it aches. The two aches live in the same chest and I've stopped trying to make them fight.
My papa got on the phone and asked about my job, my rent, whether I was eating, in that order that fathers use to say I love you without saying it. I told him about the blazer I found. He pretended to understand fashion. It was very sweet.
Behind me a tourist family took photos and a couple argued softly and a man played a slightly out of tune guitar. And I stood in the middle of it holding my phone to my ear, tethered to a house eight thousand miles away by a signal that could drop at any moment.
That's what homesickness on the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk really is. It's the reminder that you can love two places at once and still only stand in one of them.
We hung up when I reached the DUMBO side. My mummy said "call again soon," which is what she always says, which is her way of saying she'd talk to me all night if she could.
I walked down toward the water and let the ache sit with me. Some evenings you don't fix it. You just carry it home.
Two skylines, one heart. I'm learning to hold both.
Love,