It was midnight in Harlem and morning in Ahmedabad, and I called my mother from the fire escape.
This is our arrangement now, twelve and a half hours apart. My late night is her fresh chai. My tired is her just-waking. We meet in the gap.
I climbed out my kitchen window onto the fire escape on 129th Street because my apartment was too hot and too small to hold the conversation. Below me Harlem was doing its late Wednesday thing — someone's speaker, a bus sighing at the stop, a man laughing at nothing good.
She asked if I was eating properly. I lied. She knew I lied. This is also our arrangement.
Then she said the thing she always says, that she'd looked at the moon that morning — which is silly, it was daytime there — but she meant it as we're under the same sky, and I looked up from the Harlem fire escape and there it actually was, hanging over the water tanks and the brownstones, a little smudged with city light.
Same moon. Different windows.
I don't tell her half of what happens here. The rejections, the rent panic, the nights I feel like a fraud in the fashion world holding fabric I can barely afford. I give her the highlight reel because I want her to sleep.
But on the fire escape, with the J train nowhere near and Harlem soft below me, I told her a little more than usual. That some days are heavy. That I miss her food. That I'm proud of myself and terrified in equal parts.
She just listened. Then she said, in Gujarati, everything you're feeling, I felt too, once. Beti, it passes into strength.
We hung up. I stayed out on the Harlem fire escape a while longer with the moon.
Distance is just love doing long division.
Love,