It was almost midnight and I was sitting on a stranger's stoop on 31st Avenue in Astoria, calling my mother, because it was the middle of her morning and this is the arithmetic of loving someone from across an ocean.
Nine and a half hours. That is the gap between us. It means I catch her while she's making tea and she catches me while I'm falling apart, and somehow it works.
I wasn't even upset about anything specific. That's the thing nobody tells you about homesickness — it doesn't need a reason. It just arrives, quietly, usually on a good day. I'd had a good day. Then I passed an Indian grocery near Ditmars and smelled something that was almost my mother's kitchen and not quite, and that was that.
Calling my mother from a stoop in Astoria has become its own little ritual. Astoria has this warmth to it, all these overlapping neighborhoods and languages spilling onto the sidewalk, families out late, someone's aunty somewhere. It's the part of Queens that feels the least lonely to be alone in.
She asked if I was eating properly. I lied. She knew I lied. We both let it go, the way you do.
Then she told me a whole saga about our neighbor's daughter's wedding, and the caterer, and the color of the mandap, and I closed my eyes on that stoop and I was ten years old again in Ahmedabad, not listening, just being near her voice.
That's what these calls are, really. Not conversation. Proximity. A way of standing in the same room when there are five thousand miles and an ocean in between.
A man walked his dog past me and gave me a small nod, one night person to another. The N train rumbled somewhere overhead.
My mother said, beta, go home, it's late, and I said five more minutes, Mummy, the way I've been saying five more minutes to her my whole life.
Some distances you don't close. You just learn to sit inside them, on a stoop, at midnight, holding a phone like a hand.
Love,