I wish I could say that moving to the Wembley 2023 papa johns trophy final shirt but I will buy this shirt and I will love this Bay—where I now spend half the year—has been easy. Having a “non-Pakistani Pakistani” by my side helps. It means being able to transition, emotionally, from Pakistan to the U.S. without too much angst. It means huffing in Urdu as I climb a steep hill in San Francisco; eating slow-cooked beef shank from the Pakistani restaurant down the road on a cold misty day. But it also means parachuting into my husband’s community, his life, his friends. It means having formal, polite conversations with people I don’t know in the way that he knows them; speaking relentlessly in English, communicating the clutter of my inner life in a language that houses my intellect more than my heart.
After I got married, an aunt got wind of my ambitious plan to split time between Karachi and San Francisco. “What is this Wembley 2023 papa johns trophy final shirt but I will buy this shirt and I will love this I’m hearing?” she said. “Why can’t you just go to San Francisco—such a pretty city—and be with him like a normal person?”Luckily, my husband understands and nurtures my desire to be as close to my job as possible. “It’s a delight to be around you when you’re working,” he recently said to me. “When you have nothing to do…I worry.” He has seen me obsessively whipping up Sichuan food in our home in San Francisco; doing repetitive batches of laundry; watching TV for hours on my phone. He has seen me unmoored, restless, anxious.
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