I remember the back of his head, and the profile of his nose stark against the pale sky backdrop. He stands out in a glow like green treetops underlining dark rain clouds. There’s salt in the air—even though I know now there is no salt in the water—and a constant, belligerent mist that cuts at our skin like some ethereal exfoliation. I’m squinting eyes against it all, and the blunt edges of my bowl cut are fluttering in the wind as I lean out the side. But that’s as far as it goes. As far as it goes, it’s just him and I. Him in a white khaddar shirt, with silver rimmed glasses and wisps of hair crowning the edges of his ears. A thin watch around his wrist where veins and bones stand out like slopes and valleys. I remember the freckles of age on his cheeks, even though he was far from being as old as he would live to be.
I have perspective now. I know when the last opportunity for me to speak to him passed, I know when the last time he’d sit on the couch in our living room in Shrewsbury was. I know the last time we would sit together in silence, holding hands under the whirring ceiling fan, saying nothing because words are superfluous sometimes when you love someone. But sometimes even if words are superfluous, I know now I should speak because it’s better to hear a nonsense response than to hear the decline of a dwindling mind.
I know that day on the Hudson River, looking up at the back of his head, the first moment in time I saved to the ROM in my mind, was the landmark I would spend the first seventeen years of my life crawling back to, begging and bargaining like a desperate hitchhiker. I hated every moment I wasn’t there, and held that hatred in my heart, because sometimes holding onto any little scrap you can get your hands on is all you do when you love something without reason, without sense.
If you drive in from the Queensboro bridge at night, the world becomes ominous and dystopian, and for a short while, you find yourself in Bladerunner 2049, gliding into the city between tall, tall buildings and a million blank windows of light.
You’re small and insignificant, like that feeling when you’re swimming over a black dip in the sea floor, floating around and waiting for something to come up from the depths and signal the end of your times. It’s like that here. But where there would be terrifying silence, there’s an overdose of senses.
You once did a project in freshman year about that overdose. You focused on sound, because sometimes the screeches of a subway train would match up perfectly with the glorious film scores playing privately in your ears, or sometimes the onslaught of noise would all mesh so perfectly that it would become something beautiful enough to capture. So you created your own cacophony by standing on random street corners and writing poetry while turning on the voice recording in your phone.
You even did that once across the world, on the side of the road at night, the sound of a car door slamming and some Indian song playing loudly in the distance, because you suppose, the cacophony in this new city is no different than the cacophony in the cities your parents grew up in and you spent half of your summers in thus far.
And like the cities your parents grew up in, in this city as well, you tend to hang around the borders and refuges. In the space left between two barcoded books after someone takes one off the shelf. In the momentary privacy of a friend’s rooftop above the world, the only light coming from the fading sunset and the cherries of your cigarettes. In the silence of a stranger’s bedroom, platform boots and socks thrown carelessly into the corner, letting their fingers outline the blisters on your heel and shin. You play the ocean under your pillow to fall asleep, and dream of drop-offs and eldritch creatures and find bizarre comfort in your darkest fears, in subjecting yourself to every panicked possibility, and cope in the fact that you are not coping. You make your space by letting yourself feel like there is none to begin with. Some sort of failsafe against success, to failsafe against failure.
And yet you wonder why there are no pani puri stands every time you pass by a food truck boasting the delicious aromas of chicken kebabs, and make plans to open your own, but then you pass by an incense stall that viscerally catapults you halfway across the world for one dizzy moment, and that moment is when this city feels like home.
Which is odd, because this city is objectively closer to home in Massachusetts, than the India across the world that you spent a quarter of your life in, and it should cause an identity crisis but instead all it does is make you yearn that much more for something you thought you’d grabbed a hold of when you moved here.
Because you should be singing rock on some stage in front of a crowd of peers. You should be taking pictures everywhere you go and sketching the art you see in museums, and spending all your time in the reading room of the public library. But instead you’ve realized that who you are isn’t a radiant artist, but someone who has a panic attack walking down the street. Someone who doesn't serendipitously meet someone on the subway, but someone who wonders about every story each person holds and internalizes it until it eats you alive with self-pity and curiosity.
But that’s you. Not the you that rode down the Hudson River holding her grandfather’s hand. Not the you who insisted on doing nothing more than what you were meant to be doing—who insisted on living your life solely for yourself and no one else. Not the you that missed the city when you left and loved it when you arrived. You’re the you that now misses it when you arrive and loves it when you leave. You’re the you that collects piles of books in every free space in your room, and lends your friend’s copies that you wrote notes in. You’re the you that has panic attacks every time you walk down the street, but walks in platform boots with Queen in her ears like nothing is wrong in the world. You’re the you that yearned for what you have now, and you’re the you that yearns for what you will never have still.
You flounder painfully, because that’s what you do here, in the depths of the deep blue, in the endlessness of the light squares and concrete corners.