The first cold Sunday of the season arrived in Astoria like it had somewhere to be. One day I was fine in a cardigan, the next I was digging through my closet for the big coat I swore I'd never need again.
Something about the first cold Sunday always does this to me. It cracks something open.
I woke up in my apartment off 30th Avenue and the light was doing that thin, silvery October thing, and I just wanted my mother's kitchen so badly it felt physical.
So I decided to make dal. How hard could it be. I've watched Mummy make it a thousand times, phone propped against the toor dal container, talking over the pressure cooker.
I did everything right. The hing, the cumin, the exact amount of haldi she measures in her palm and never with a spoon. I tempered the garlic until it was golden. I even FaceTimed her halfway through, our kitchens eleven hours and eight thousand miles apart.
And it still didn't taste right.
That's the cruelest part of homesickness. It's not even really about the food. I can get better dal at the Jackson Heights joint one stop down on the train. It's about the hands that made it, the kitchen it was made in, the sound of my dad's cricket commentary leaking in from the next room.
I ate my almost-right dal on the floor by the window because my table is covered in fabric swatches again. Astoria was going about its business below me, the Greek bakeries and the hookah lounges and the aunties with their rolling carts, a whole world that is mine now but still not home home.
Here is the thing nobody prepared me for about moving across the world. Homesickness doesn't go away. It just gets quieter, and then a cold Sunday in Astoria turns the volume back up.
I'm not sad, exactly. I chose this life. I love this life. But loving two places at once means being a little bit incomplete in both.
My dal was eighty percent right. Maybe that's what being an immigrant is. Eighty percent right, and learning to be grateful for it.
Call your mom. Mine's probably still awake.
Love,