On Floating, Belonging, and Memory
A week in New York of reflecting on the weight—and weightlessness—of all my homes.
When I return to an old home, my body and memory become loud.
I swap gravity for water. I float.
The ground is not beneath my feet, but I’m safe. I’m held by water.
I was in New York for a week. The place of my birth. My first home. First school. First sleepover. First death up close.
The place where I learned what family is. What community feels like. What celebration means. What grief does.
For a week in New York, I was floating. And as always, returning opened a floodgate: of memory, of dislocation, of anchoring.
I have called 15 different places home in my life. I’m 43, so that means home is a new place every 2.3 years.
Every 2.3 years, I somehow figure out how to make the four walls around me and a roof over me, a place grounded in safety, belonging, and memory. I somehow figure out how to build a community that I show up for, and one that shows up for me.
In her 13 years, I have also had to create a home for Nava 5 times. Every 2.6 years of her life.
I find that math exhausting and increasingly unsettling.
When my brain is overtaken by silver linings, I think moving around will give her the tools and muscle to be agile and thrive in a fast-changing, overheating, and AI leapfrogging unpredictable world.
But in the moments I feel like a fish out of water, I drown myself in blame and guilt for not giving her the safety, comfort, and grounding that comes with the same home, system, and community.
The first half of our trip was in Long Island, New York.
My childhood bestie Hala drove an hour to pick us up from the airport at 10pm on a workday. She gasped when I suggested we’d Uber it. “I’m home now before 10, I can do it!”
Up until a few months ago, she was working 13 hour+ days for years, commuting to a leading architecture firm in Manhattan. Hala is a top technical architect. She’s worked with Zaha Hadid, and been on the main team of many famous skyscrapers and bridges and cool things around the world. Hala will never tell anyone this though. She is incredibly understated and never wants to stand out. If I ever sing her praises, she says I’m making it all up.
She recently moved to a local practice in Long Island and works 9-5pm, so she says her schedule is now manageable. Her math doesn’t math though. She also has a set of 6 year old twins, a 10 year old, and long-term hosts two of her husband’s 20-something nieces, who are studying in the area, and was short-term hosting her husband’s cousins family visiting from Lahore while we were staying at her place.
Over the next three days, the long 4th of July weekend, we piled 8 kids, the one’s Hala birthed and the ones she was hosting, in her minivan, and we went to the beach, a fancy garden an hour away, a Palestinian restaurant, a community brunch, community BBQ, a Desi boba place, Target, and her childhood home to visit her ailing grandmother, who we grew up calling Nani, and learnt most Punjabi curse words from.
In Long Island, I get unconditional love from so many elders and friends, I feel held in ways that are real, but fleeting. I am floating and living off the roots that my parents planted lovingly and deeply in their youth, but pulled out in their midlives.
As a parent you want your child to feel safe and grow to their greatest potential.
But how do they feel safe if their roots are always being unpotted, untangled, and transplanted to new soil? And where are they growing if their roots are always floating?
My father went into the US embassy in Pakistan for a tourist visa and left with a green card in 1970. That’s how immigration worked back then.
He arrived in New York City after a month of backpacking in Europe in a suit. He didn’t call it backpacking, I am. He was staying in hostels but all of his touristy pictures from that time are in a suit.
By the time he got to his final destination, he was broke and needed to get a job to pay for a hostel. He opened the newspaper and responded to a job opening. The next day in that same suit he was touristing around Europe in, he went for a job interview in Manhattan. On his third day in NYC, he was an actuarial trainee. Within a few days he met other Pakistanis. Soon he was sharing an apartment with Pervaiz Uncle, the architect, and Sheikho Uncle, the accountant, in Jackson Heights, Queens. Within a few years they’d all be married living in separate apartments in Astoria, Queens.
And soon they’d all be working in Manhattan while raising their kids miles away from each other in suburban homes in Nassau County, Long Island, NY. They’d drive an hour to get halal meat. They rented the basement of a Presbyterian church to make a mosque. They all smoked. Cracked a lot of jokes. Played with their kids. Were openly loving to their wives. Pervaiz Uncle’s daughter Hala and I were inseparable.
So obviously our Catholic school separated us, the first chance they got, in Pre-K. I wasn’t ready to be in Pre-K alone, so I made a sobbing affair of it every morning. My mother was looking forward to having her mornings back after 7 years of caring for two small kids, so held her ground.
But on the fourth day of my endless hiccup crying, my father said I didn’t have to go. I didn’t start formal school until I was a few months short of 6 and it was the best unilateral parenting decision my father ever took. There have only been a handful like that in my life. My parents are otherwise glued like conjoined twins in their parenting.
Our community grew. There were dozens like us. But most parents were doctors. We chased fireflies and took turns on slip and slide in summer. We went to the mosque for Sunday School. We celebrated Christmas and Halloween together. We had elaborate Eids spread out over days with treasure hunts, cultural shows, and parties with dozens of families swarming tiny homes, unless they were doctors. Then they were big homes, with pools and a housekeeper.
Then Pervaiz Uncle died of a heart attack. He was in his early 30s. I saw mourning and grief up close.
At 6, I started learning how to show up for a friend who had lost her most primal of relationships. Our community threw her birthday party a few weeks after her father passed. I went to get the cake with my father. I chose an elaborate colorful cake with a circus on it. I wanted her to be happy. I only saw her sad and crying the last few weeks. I kept on thinking about my last memory of Pervaiz Uncle throwing us up in the air in the backyard. He’d throw us up so high, the other adults would tell him we’d get hurt. But we would say higher and he’d throw us higher. I remember on my last turn, he was so winded, I told him I was done, even though I really wasn’t.
When I’m floating, I trust the water to carry me. I never float in a straight line. No matter how much I try, I’ll bump into someone or a wall and the spell of being underwater will be broken. My body’s sense of direction isn’t great. When I can, I try to use clouds in the sky as a compass, but often my body is too loud for me to keep focus. So I float with the expectation that gravity will interrupt me.
On land, it's noisy and clockwork. There are tethered people rooted in their lives, structure, and systems.
Systems I used to be part of. Structures I held. Lives I no longer can live.
In the water, it is quiet and just me and a blank canvas or sky above.
The water is holding me up. I’m not weightless, but the water dissociates me from the weight of the world and the system that’s now nostalgia.
As I submerge my ears below the surface, it drowns out the people outside. Their voices are now miles away. And my body is an intimate listening chamber.
I hear my heartbeat get slower. Thump. Thump. Thump. I hear my jaw unclenching. It sounds like a balloon popping in slow motion.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Pink Salt to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.