Nobody tells you homesickness doesn't wait for occasions.
It doesn't politely show up on Diwali or your birthday when you've braced for it. It ambushes you on a Tuesday, in your Astoria kitchen, while your mother holds the phone too close to her face and you can see the exact ceiling fan you grew up under.
I was fine. Genuinely fine. I had made chai — bad chai, the milk slightly caught, because the stove in this apartment runs too hot. And then Papa walked into frame in his sleeveless undershirt, the one he's had since I was twelve, and he said, "You're eating properly?" and I just. Lost it.
This is the part of homesickness people don't post about. The unglamorous wet-faced part at 9PM on a weeknight while the N train rattles past your window.
My parents didn't panic. They've learned. Mom just kept talking — about the neighbor's daughter's wedding, about the mango season being especially good this year, about nothing — and let me cry quietly through it. There is a particular love in being allowed to fall apart without anyone making it a big deal.
The homesickness is sharper in June, I've realized. Back home this is mango season. Aamras, the proper kind, the kind Mom would never let me help make because I'd "mess up the consistency." Here I pay nine dollars for two sad mangoes at the Bangladeshi grocery on Steinway Street and they taste like the idea of a mango.
What I'm learning about homesickness is that it isn't a wound to be fixed. It's just love with nowhere to go for the moment. It means I have a home worth missing. Not everyone gets that.
After we hung up I sat with my bad chai and let it be sad for a while. Then I texted my friend Reshma, who lives one stop away, and she came over with a bag of those exact nine-dollar mangoes and we ate them over the sink like animals.
Home isn't only one place. I'm starting to believe that. It's also a girl from one stop down on the N showing up with mangoes.
Miss your people loudly this week. They like knowing.
Love,