The Phone Call You Didn't Know How to Make

There is the Sunday call. The one you make out of habit, sometimes out of love, sometimes out of duty — all three at once, it's hard to separate them. You call, they answer, you ask about the weather there and they ask about the weather here, and someone's blood pressure is up slightly and your cousin's wedding is being moved to a different venue, and the call ends with a reminder to eat well and get enough sleep, and you feel connected and distant simultaneously.

That is not the call I mean.

I mean the other one.

The Rehearsal

You've rehearsed it. In the shower, most likely. Standing under the water, running the conversation in your head — how it starts, what you say first, how they will respond, what you will say to that response. You've rehearsed it so many times that you know where the pauses will fall and where the conversation might turn difficult and where you might need to pause and let them catch up with what you've said.

And then you don't make the call.

You make the Sunday call instead. You talk about the weather.

The hard call sits in you like an object with weight.

What Makes It Hard

The distance in a diaspora family is not only geographic. If it were only geographic, the phone would fix it — and we have had phones for long enough to know that it doesn't, not entirely. There is a distance that is generational, that is about what you learned to say and what they learned to say and the ways those languages don't quite translate.

Your parents raised you to be strong, competent, together. They raised you at a cost that they carry and you carry differently — you carry the knowledge of what it took, and sometimes the weight of being the reason it had to happen at all. The sacrifice has always been present between you, unspoken, creating a kind of formal atmosphere even in moments of genuine love.

To call and say: I am not managing as well as you think. Or: I need you to understand something about my life that I don't know how to explain in our language. Or: I did something and I don't know if you can forgive it and I need to ask anyway. These things require you to dismantle the version of yourself you have been performing for them, possibly for years.

That is what makes it hard.

The Call About a Sick Parent

Some of these calls get forced. The call where you find out your father's health is more serious than anyone said in the last three Sunday calls. The information comes sideways — from a sibling, from an auntie, from a cousin who didn't know you hadn't been told — and suddenly you are standing in your kitchen in a city that is an eight-hour flight from the kitchen you grew up in, holding information that has changed the shape of everything.

You make the call. It starts with weather. It takes forty-five minutes to get to what the call is actually about. Your father makes a joke. You recognise the joke as a shield and you let him keep it because taking it away feels cruel.

You hang up. You stare at the ceiling.

The Call You're Trying to Say Sorry

Some things don't translate. An apology for something that exists in the language of therapy and self-understanding and the particular kind of introspection that comes from living alone in a foreign city for years — this does not translate into the language your parents speak. Not because they don't love you. Because the framework doesn't exist in that register.

You can say the words. You have practiced them. But the words, when they arrive, will land in a different context than the one you're speaking from. They will be received through the lens of worry — are you okay? what happened? — rather than through the lens of acknowledgement.

So you try to make the call and it becomes something else. It starts as an apology and becomes a reassurance. You spend fifteen minutes convincing them you're fine. You hang up, and you haven't said what you needed to say, and you're not sure they know what you needed to say, and you're not sure it would have helped if they did.

The Silence That Means Something

There is a silence at the end of some of these calls that is different from the silence of a conversation that has run its natural course. It is a silence that is full. It contains everything that was said and everything that wasn't said and the distance that exists between you that both of you are aware of and neither of you knows how to name.

You sit in that silence for a moment before one of you says: okay, take care of yourself. Before one of you says: I'll call again soon.

What You Carry

Some of the hard calls get made. Eventually, or urgently, or with enough wine, or because something has happened that forces it. Some of them land better than expected. Some of them land exactly as badly as you feared and you survive it and the relationship survives it and something has shifted, slightly, in a direction you couldn't have predicted.

Some of them never get made. And you carry those too — the calls that stayed in the rehearsal, the things that remain unspoken between you and the person who is somehow both the person who knows you best and the person who knows you least. The people you love across a distance that isn't only miles.

There is no resolution to offer here. Some calls get made and some don't. You carry both. That is part of what diaspora means — not just the distance from home, but the particular weight of love that travels badly across it.