It's 2AM in my apartment in Astoria and 11:30AM in Ahmedabad. My mum is cooking lunch. I can hear the pressure cooker whistling through the phone and I swear it loosened something in my chest.
Nobody tells you that homesickness runs on a clock. That you'll be most awake for your family when you should be asleep. That you'll live your whole New York life nine and a half hours out of sync with the people who made you.
The time difference to India is the cruelest math I know. When I'm having my morning chai, they're sitting down to dinner. When I'm falling apart after a long day, they're still dreaming.
So tonight I stayed up. I let the N train rumble past my window and I listened to my mother chop onions and complain about my cousin's wedding planning and ask if I've been eating properly. I lied again. I've been eating a lot of cereal.
She put my dad on. He doesn't say much. He just asked about the weather here and told me to carry an umbrella, which is his entire love language. My father expresses twenty years of worry through weather forecasts and I have learned to hear the I-love-you underneath.
I moved to this city for a reason I still believe in. The fashion, the chaos, the chance to be nobody and everybody at once. But the time difference to Ahmedabad is the bill that comes due at 2AM, quietly, when I'm too tired to pretend I'm fine.
There's a scene in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge where Kajol's father finally lets her go, and I used to think it was about romance. Now I think it's about the whole impossible thing of parents letting their kids live far away. Letting go across an ocean.
We hung up when her lunch was ready. I lay in the dark in Astoria and felt both completely alone and completely loved, which is apparently a thing that can be true at the same time.
Love doesn't care about time zones. It just stays up late.
Love,