a year of home
self portraits are a way I remember to come home to myself.
When the seasons change in Harlem, there’s always a day or two where the air smells like Marol, my old neighborhood in Mumbai. Last spring it hit me while walking past the daffodils on a trail in Central Park, chatting on the phone with my therapist. Last week it hit me walking home from the subway, a little whiff in between the summer subway heat and the suddenly-cold autumn rainstorms. How gorgeous that my two cities are here, home.
I spent four years in Denver, longing for what home felt like. And then one morning, during that November in the pandemic when crossing state lines still felt scandalous, I drove over the river into Manhattan, rounded a corner of the parkway to the GWB rising out in front, and immediately burst into tears. My breath catches nearly every time I come across the GWB — against the clouds, a sunset in between, the night skyline behind.
It’s been a year since I moved home to NYC, for the second time. I am embracing solitude this season, finding pleasure in making my home just so — filling glass jars with dried pasta shapes, hauling secondhand linen armchairs up from Chinatown, tucking the slippers I stole from my sister and the sweatpants I stole from my love next to my bed for easy access on cold wet October mornings. I delight in finding my favorite takeout shop for fresh dumplings swimming in chili garlic oil, a library bar to curl up with a sazerac and bell hooks in a velvet armchair, new miles to walk alone amongst the throngs of people. This city is warm, vibrant, loving, home.
a few medicines, or, how to make a home:
we are “as possible as yeast / as imminent as bread.”
“an unmarried woman who made her living by spinning fiber into thread, bringing warmth and pleasure to our naked lives,” or, a spinster. (via)
“relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.”
everyone loves someone who had an abortion.
queer desi maximalism, in pink and peach and yellow.
until next time.