There's a rooftop in Astoria that my friend Reema has keys to, and on Tuesday we went up there with cheap wine and warm naan from a place on Steinway Street.
The sky was doing that pink thing it does in June, the whole of Queens spread out under it, the N train rattling somewhere below like a heartbeat that won't quit.
I called my mother. It was already early morning in Ahmedabad, the 9.5-hour gap that makes my whole life a slightly delayed echo. She was making chai. Of course she was making chai.
"Show me," she said, meaning the view, and I turned the phone around. She went quiet. Then she said the buildings looked cold. She is not wrong about most things.
Homesickness is a strange tenant. It pays no rent and shows up whenever it pleases, usually at sunset, usually when something is beautiful. I will be perfectly happy on an Astoria rooftop and then a woman three buildings over will call her kids in for dinner and suddenly my chest is full of Ahmedabad.
I miss things that don't even make sense. The specific honk of the autorickshaws. The way the whole street smelled of frying before Diwali. My mother yelling that I'd catch a cold with wet hair, which she did over the phone on Tuesday, eight thousand miles away, like the distance was nothing.
Reema watched me hang up and didn't say anything dumb like "you okay?" She just refilled my glass. This is what good friends do here. They let the homesickness sit at the table with you instead of asking it to leave.
I used to think I had to choose. Be from there or be from here. But up on that rooftop I figured out you can just be split. You can love the N train and the autorickshaw. You can ache and stay.
The pink sky faded. Mumma texted: drink water. I did.
Two homes is not a wound. It's just a lot of love with nowhere convenient to put it.
Love,