I turned 24 this week on a rooftop in DUMBO and I need to talk about it before the feeling fades, because feelings this good deserve to be written down.
My friends threw it together at the last minute in that specific Brooklyn way, a rooftop apartment where you can see the Manhattan Bridge framed perfectly between two buildings, the water pink under it at golden hour.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about building a life abroad. You don't just miss your family. You slowly, quietly, accidentally grow a new one.
There was Priya from work who brought samosas she pretended she made. There was Dev who DJs and played old Kishore Kumar next to some Brooklyn indie band and somehow it worked. There was Maya who is Dominican and now knows more about Karan Johar films than I do.
My chosen family in this city is a strange beautiful patchwork. None of us are from here. All of us are from somewhere we ache for a little. Maybe that's the glue.
Someone made a cake and yes they put a candle in it and yes I cried, but softly, and I blamed the Brooklyn wind, and everyone let me.
When you move 7,000 miles from Ahmedabad you brace for loneliness. What I didn't brace for was this: a rooftop full of people who chose to spend a Tuesday night celebrating a girl who's only known them a couple of years.
That's what chosen family is. It's people who have no obligation to love you and do it anyway.
I thought about Mumma and Nani and the birthdays back home, the whole extended family crammed into our flat. This was smaller. It was different. It was, in its own way, complete.
The Manhattan Bridge lit up. Dev played the song from my favorite film. Maya put her head on my shoulder.
Home isn't only a place you leave. Sometimes it's the people who show up on a DUMBO rooftop and refuse to let you feel far from anything.
Twenty-four, and richer than I've ever been in the ways that count.
Love,