There's a specific loneliness that only shows up when you're surrounded by people having fun.
Saturday I was at a rooftop in Williamsburg. Good crowd, string lights, someone's playlist doing that thing where it plays a Bollywood song ironically and everyone loses their mind. The skyline was doing its whole show across the river. Objectively, a perfect night.
And I felt like the loneliest girl in Brooklyn.
It hit me somewhere between the second drink and someone asking, kindly, "So do you go home a lot?" And I did the math out loud for the first time in a while. It's been fourteen months since I've seen my parents. Fourteen. My little cousin is taller than me now, I've only seen it on a screen.
I excused myself and went to the quiet corner of the rooftop where the AC units hum, and I called my mom. It was already Sunday morning in Ahmedabad. She picked up on the second ring, of course she did, she always does.
I didn't even say anything for a second. She said "Pooja?" and I just started crying. Full, ugly, mascara-abandoning crying, on a Williamsburg rooftop, while forty feet away people danced to a song from a movie she took me to see when I was nine.
She didn't panic. She asked if I'd eaten. Because of course she did. Homesickness in an Indian family gets treated like low blood sugar and honestly she's not entirely wrong.
We talked for twenty minutes. She told me about the neighbor's daughter's wedding, about the monsoon being late this year, about my dad's knee. Small things. The small things are the whole point. The small things are what you lose when you move ten thousand kilometres away to chase a life you genuinely, deeply wanted.
Because here's the confusing part — I don't regret coming. This homesickness isn't me wanting to undo the choice. It's just the tax on it. You can love your life here and still ache for the one you left. Both true. Always both.
I went back to the party eventually. Fixed my face in someone's phone camera. Danced.
But I kept my mom's voice in my chest like a warm dabba.
Some nights the skyline isn't enough, and that's okay.
Love,