I used to think eating alone in public was a tragedy. Growing up in Ahmedabad, you're never alone — there's always a cousin, an aunty, a neighbor, a plus-one you didn't ask for. Solitude was suspicious.
Today I walked the High Line by myself with an iced coffee sweating through the cup, and I felt completely, gorgeously fine about it.
I got on at Gansevoort, near the Whitney, and just walked. Slow. No headphones. The grasses were all overgrown and golden the way they get in July, brushing against the old railway tracks. A saxophone player near 20th Street. A toddler losing his mind over a pigeon.
There was a time — like eight months ago, honestly — when I couldn't do this. I'd fill every gap with plans, texts, anyone who'd say yes, because being alone in New York felt like admitting nobody wanted me.
But being alone on the High Line taught me something. Nobody's watching. Everyone's in their own movie. That couple photographing each other, that man reading Ocean Vuong on a bench, that woman crying openly into her phone — all of us alone-together, and none of us judging.
I thought about how in Hindi we don't really have a clean word for the good kind of alone. "Akela" carries loneliness in it, sadness. But this wasn't akela. This was chosen. This was mine.
I sat on one of those wooden loungers overlooking 10th Avenue, watched the traffic, and drank my coffee too fast because it was melting. A pigeon considered joining me. I let him.
Moving here alone at 24 was the scariest thing I've done. But somewhere between the panic and now, I became someone who can sit with herself on a Tuesday and not need to fill the silence.
My mother would still worry. "You went alone?" But being alone on the High Line isn't lonely. It's just me, finally on good terms with myself.
Learn to take yourself out. You're better company than you think.
Love,