It was 96 degrees on Saturday and I decided the answer was the free public pool at Astoria Park.
If you've never been, it's this enormous WPA-era pool under the Hell Gate Bridge, and on a hot day the whole neighborhood shows up. Egyptian aunties, Colombian kids, a bachelor party wearing matching floaties. It's very loud and very good.
I was waiting in the line to get in, sweating, holding my rolled towel, when someone behind me started playing music off their phone. And it was a Gujarati garba song. Not Bollywood-famous. The kind you'd only know if someone in your family played it.
And I just cried. In the Astoria Park pool line. In sunglasses, thank god.
Homesickness is a strange animal because it doesn't come when you plan for it. It didn't come on Diwali when I was alone with a candle and a Zoom call. It came in a swimsuit, in Queens, waiting to swim in public water with two hundred strangers.
I kept my face forward. I didn't turn around to find who was playing it. Some things you don't want to explain, you just want to feel. The Astoria Park pool line gave me a whole three minutes of Ahmedabad and then the line moved and I went in.
The water was cold and shocking and I let it take the whole afternoon off my back. I floated on my back and looked at the Hell Gate Bridge and thought: I'm allowed to be two places at once. I'm allowed to be building a life here and still ache for a courtyard there.
My mom always says you don't get homesick for a place, you get homesick for a version of yourself. Maybe that's it. I was homesick for the girl who knew that song without trying.
I dried off on the N train home, hair smelling like chlorine and sun.
Some afternoons you go for a swim and come back with your whole heart wrung out. Worth it.
Love,