My best friend here left for Mumbai this week and I've been walking around the city like it's wearing her absence.
We met three years ago at a mutual friend's Diwali party in the Lower East Side, two Indian girls clocking each other across a room full of strangers, doing that instant desi-in-diaspora recognition. You know it. You find your people by a frequency only you can hear.
For three years she was my chosen family. The one who came over when the dal was too watery. The one who watched Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham with me at 2am when we were both too homesick to sleep. The one who understood the exact texture of missing a place while also not being sure you'd want to go back.
And then her visa situation got complicated in that quiet cruel way, and her family needed her, and Mumbai called, and she answered. That's the thing about moving back to Mumbai or anywhere home. Sometimes it's a choice and sometimes it's a tide.
We said goodbye on a corner near the Delancey-Essex stop. She had two enormous suitcases and I had a face doing everything not to cry. We hugged the way you hug when you both know a hug can't do the job. And then she went down into the L train and it just, swallowed her. Doors closed. Gone.
I stood on the corner for a full minute like an idiot.
Here's what nobody warns you about immigrant friendships. Everyone is provisional. Everyone might leave. Visas, families, opportunities, tides. You build something real knowing it might get relocated across an ocean at any moment. You love people anyway. What else is there.
She moving back to Mumbai doesn't end us. WhatsApp exists. But the specific thing we had, the two of us against this enormous cold beautiful city, that particular shape of it is over. Now she's my friend in another time zone and I'm the one who stayed.
Being the one who stays is its own strange grief. The city looks the same and feels emptier. Her chai spot on Ludlow is just a chai spot now.
I'm okay. I will be more okay. Tonight I made the watery dal on purpose, in her honor.
Hold your people close, even the temporary ones. Especially those.
Love,