I told my mother I'd be back next month. It took me ten years.
Eight months back in Nepal now and I still haven't written the thing I keep meaning to write. So I'm just going to type and not fix it.
The morning I left, 2014, Aama held it together through the chiya, through the photos, and then right at the gate she just broke — and I smiled and said "Aama k gareko, ma ta gaako, aba aaunchhu ni" like it was nothing. I was so proud of not crying. Then I cried for four hours straight the night I reached Dallas, sitting on the floor because the bed hadn't come yet.
That apartment was so quiet. I grew up with everyone yelling over each other, and suddenly it was just the fridge humming. I used to call home while cooking dinner just to have voices in the room — Aama on the counter there, me on the counter here, both just cooking, not even talking. Best part of a lot of days, honestly.
The time difference was the cruel part. Eleven hours. So many calls were just "sutney bela bhayo, ramro sanga basa" before we'd even really talked. I fell asleep with the video call running more times than I can count — sometimes I'd wake up and Buwa had fallen asleep too, in his chair, phone tilted at the ceiling fan, and I'd just watch a minute before hanging up.
That first Dashain I "got" tika over a screen, forehead bare, in a studio in Texas. I missed two weddings and one funeral I still can't talk about. You learn to be the face in the little rectangle while everyone hugs on the other side.
The first time it snowed in Dallas, the only thing I thought was, I wish Aama could see this. She'd never seen snow. I took a video I never sent because it didn't capture it at all.
There was pride too. I paid off my parents' loan, sent money for Buwa's knee surgery. But nobody saw the double shifts, the manager who made my life hell, crying in the work bathroom and walking back out with my face fixed. People back home see america and a number in a remittance. They don't see the Tuesday nights.
The thing that sits heaviest now: my parents got old while I was gone. I came back and Buwa moves slower, Aama's hands shake a little, and I lost ten years of ordinary days with them for a bank balance. The money was real, it changed things. But some nights I still do the math nobody wants to do — the years against the rupees — and it doesn't come out clean.
Proud and hollow at the same time, if that makes sense. Glad I went. Not sure what it cost.
Coming back is not the easy part. Nobody tells you that the leaving and the coming back are both their own kind of hard.