I went to Brooklyn Bridge Park on Sunday to feel like a person again.
September in New York does this soft, golden thing where the light goes syrupy around 5PM and everyone pretends they're in a film. I took the F to York Street, walked down to the water in DUMBO, and found a bench facing the whole show — the skyline, the bridge, the ferries cutting little white seams into the river.
I had my headphones in on shuffle. And then Lata Mangeshkar happened.
"Lag Jaa Gale." A song older than my mother. A song my nani used to hum while oiling my hair on the terrace back in Ahmedabad, both of us squinting into the same kind of evening light.
And I just... went. Right there in Brooklyn Bridge Park, in front of two hundred tourists and a man selling mango slices, I cried.
Not the pretty kind. The ugly kind, where you have to pretend you got something in your eye and then give up pretending.
Homesickness is strange. It doesn't knock. It doesn't wait for a convenient Tuesday. It comes riding in on a sixty-year-old melody while you're supposed to be enjoying the view.
I moved to this city to become someone. And I have, a little. But nobody tells you that becoming someone new means quietly grieving the girl who stayed behind. The one who never left the terrace.
A woman walked past, saw my face, and just gently said, "You okay, hon?" And I nodded, and she believed me, because that's the mercy of strangers.
I sat there until the light went blue and my nose stopped running. Brooklyn Bridge Park held me the way parks do — without asking anything back.
Then I called my nani. It was 3AM there. She picked up on the second ring anyway, because grandmothers always do.
Some distances close the second someone says your name.
Love,