My phone lit up at 6:04am. Papa. Ahmedabad calling.
I almost sent it to voicemail. It's the time difference — he forgets, or he doesn't forget and just decides I'll survive. Usually these calls are logistics. Did you send the documents. Is your visa fine. Why is your bank sending emails.
But something made me answer this time. Maybe because I was already awake, lying in my Astoria apartment listening to the N train rattle by, thinking about nothing.
He didn't want anything. That's the thing. My father, who has never in his life made a call without an agenda, just wanted to tell me he'd been walking past a shop in our old neighborhood and saw a dress in the window and thought of me.
"It was your kind of thing," he said. "Too much, but nice."
I laughed. Too much but nice is possibly the most accurate review of my entire personality anyone has ever given.
And then he got quiet and said the house feels big now. That was all. The house feels big now.
I sat with the phone against my ear and looked at the crack of grey light coming through my curtains and I didn't know what to say. Because I chose this. I chose New York, the fashion thing, the 30th Avenue mornings, the whole beautiful exhausting distance of it.
But choosing something doesn't mean it stops costing something.
We talked for eleven minutes about nothing. The neighbor's dog. My cousin's engagement. Whether I'm eating properly, which — reader, I am not, I had cold samosas from a Jackson Heights place for dinner.
When we hung up I didn't go back to sleep. I made chai the real way, the way that takes fifteen minutes and stinks up the whole apartment with ginger and cardamom, and I let the smell fill the big empty rooms of my own small life.
Some distances you feel in your chest, not on a map.
Call your people. Even when they don't want anything.
Love,