Nobody warns you that homesickness doesn't come on the bad days.
It comes on the perfect ones.
Sunday in Prospect Park was flawless. Seventy-four degrees, the kind of light that makes Brooklyn look like it's apologizing for the winter. I spread a thin dupatta on the grass near the Long Meadow and ate mango I'd cut up at home, and the juice ran down my wrist exactly the way it did when I was nine on my Ba's terrace.
That was the moment it got me.
Because back home, eating a mango is never a solo activity. There's a whole committee. Someone tells you you're doing it wrong. Someone steals the seed to suck on it. Somebody's auntie is yelling about wasting too much flesh. Mango is loud. Mango is family.
Here I was, alone on a dupatta in Prospect Park, doing it silently and correctly, and it felt like the saddest thing in the world.
Around me, people had their picnic blankets and their dogs and their group of seven friends and their easy belonging. And I had a perfect mango and the J train home and a homesickness so specific it had a temperature and a smell.
The homesickness on the good days is the worst kind because you can't even be angry at the city. New York gave me a beautiful afternoon. I just didn't have anyone to turn to and say, can you believe how good this is.
I texted the family group. Eleven minutes later my dad sent a thumbs up and my cousin sent a voice note that was four minutes of nothing important and I listened to all of it twice.
The distance doesn't shrink. You just learn to eat the mango anyway.
Some days the homesickness is just love with nowhere to go.
Love,