The legacies I carry are a tapestry of moments: a half-stitched masterpiece with no beginning and no end. It’s rife with color, fraying at the ends where stories have faded from memory, and so painstakingly woven that I can only describe it through bits and pieces from a story before my own.

***

A gold star in the center of the tapestry. December 4th, 1995.

A young man shivers in front of JFK International Airport. He’s never felt cold like this before, the kind that burns his hands and hangs his breath like smoke. The city’s foreign to him, a striking blend of glass towers and cobblestone streets. There’s bitter nicotine in the air, followed by a crowd of men and women dressed in those long trenchcoats that he’d only ever seen in the white-and-black films at home. There’s a different culture here—vivid saris and kurtas replaced with purposefully torn jeans, boots, plain T-shirts—a unique type of community and vibrancy of life that feels like a different kind of home.

The young man follows the crowd to the underground subway, steps onto a train with more shades of people than he’s ever seen in one place. He shares a frost-bitten railing with a young mother and the baby that clings to her side.

He’s about to start a new life in this strange place—in a city known for its peculiarity, in a country known for its endless possibility—and he’s starting it alone. To go from a star in the premier medical school of India to a nobody in New York City…feels like a dream come true.

***

 Shades of gray and blue, faded around the edges. 1995 – 2000.

She’s been waiting by the landline for an hour. Her father watches the news in the living room, sipping at a burning cup of chai. Her own had long gone cold beside untouched medical books.  

Finally, finally, the phone rings. Her husband’s shortened American number pops up on the screen.

She’s about to yell at him, about to tell him off for leaving her so worried when she’s eight thousand miles away. But he’s telling her about his day, and she’s waited so long to hear him talk about his new surgical training, the odd jobs he runs on the side to save up for a place worthy of their family. She can tell he hasn’t been sleeping by how the words tumble from his lips like he’s lost control of them, how he whispers ‘I love you’ a dozen times over. She can only say it back once before there’s static.

“Your call has been disconnected”, the tinny-voiced operator says, “please try again in an hour, or pay additional funds to continue.”

She lays her head down against the table as the clock hits midnight and waits. 

***

Vibrant red diamonds. June 25th, 2001.

She’s stepping out of the airport. It’s warm here—not as unforgiving as India’s sun and water-thick air—but enough that she feels a little closer to home. It’s a strange city, New York, and she gets a little lost in the chaotic streets until someone calls her name.

His voice is clear for the first time in years, unmuffled by a cheap landline and oceans of distance.

She’s holding him tight before he can even say hello.

***

A lone black heart. November 8th, 2008.

She was on the way to pick their daughter up from daycare when the hospital called. The paramedic spoke to her the same way she spoke to patients that weren’t going to make the night.

“We’ve found someone in a pretty bad car accident”, the man said, “and you were his emergency contact. How quickly can you come over?”

She arrives just as they’re hoisting her husband into an ambulance. White bandages wrap from his wrists to his shoulders and blood streams down a broken nose. His eyes are closed, arms crossed against a weakly rising chest. Snow flurries obscure the red and blue siren lights—amidst the snow and bandaging and wreckage, he’s a stranger. Another still body on another pale hospital bed.

She didn’t let herself break in front of their little girl as they drove home—Papa’s just not feeling well, she said, and we’ll see him when he’s doing better.

Only when their daughter fell asleep against her chest in their favorite blue rocking chair, did she let herself cry.

***

Paintbrush strokes of purple and gold. 2008-2023.
Time flew by over the next fifteen years. Our family moved to Missouri, then Georgia (where they had my sister), then Pennsylvania, Delaware, Kentucky.

My father took a fellowship in Arizona. My mother took both my sister and I to a beautiful apartment in downtown Tampa, Florida. He came home as often as could amidst the pandemic—and my parents spent every night talking over the phone. I spent my high school years falling asleep to their hushed conversations across the hall.

When he came home, it was like our family stitched itself together again. And that tapestry continued to grow. 

***

My parents’ story is only one of a dozen that I could’ve told, but there’s something deeply cathartic about sharing the legacy of the people who raised you. You grieve with them as you write their struggles, celebrate their success even through a white document.

I’ll always be their little girl—even as I become an adult and start marking my own story on that tapestry.