Sundays I call home. It's the one appointment I never cancel.
I've started taking the call from a bench in Astoria Park, the one near the water where you can see the Hell Gate Bridge and, if you tilt your head, pretend the East River is some other river entirely.
The time difference makes it her evening, my morning. She's usually done with dinner, sometimes still holding a cup of chai I can't smell through the phone, which feels like its own small cruelty.
This week the call wrecked me a little.
She was telling me about my cousin's engagement, who all is coming, what she's getting stitched, and I realized I'd be missing it. Again. I do the math constantly — how many more of these moments will happen without me in the frame. The number is always growing.
From a bench in Astoria Park I watched a family lay out a picnic, three generations of them, an auntie barking instructions in a language I didn't recognize but somehow completely understood. The grandmother was feeding a toddler by hand. My chest did that thing.
Mummy heard it in my voice. She always does. "Beta, why your voice is heavy."
I said it was nothing, allergies, the wind. She let me lie because that's what love does sometimes.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about leaving. You don't get homesick for a place. You get homesick for a chair at a specific table, for the exact pitch of your mother saying your name when she's pretending to be annoyed but isn't.
I moved here for a reason. The fashion, the work, the life I'm building stitch by stitch. I don't regret it. But love and distance live in the same body and they don't always get along.
We talked for an hour on that bench in Astoria Park. By the end she was laughing about something my uncle said and I was laughing too, the river going gold, both of us pretending we weren't both a little sad.
Before she hung up she said, "Same time next Sunday."
That's how you carry a home across an ocean — one Sunday at a time.
Love,