Friendship is the breakup nobody warns you about.
I was on a rooftop in the Lower East Side on Friday, one of those overpriced ones with string lights and drinks that cost more than my grocery budget, and I looked across the table at a girl I used to tell everything to. And I realized: I don't know her anymore.
We met my first year in New York. She was my person. We rode the F train together, split cheap dumplings on Grand Street, cried in bathrooms at parties. For a while she was my whole map of this city.
And then, slowly, without any fight, we drifted. The texts got shorter. The plans got flakier. The group chat went quiet and nobody said why.
The hardest thing about a friendship ending is there's no ritual for it. When you break up with someone romantically, everyone knows what to do. Ice cream, sad songs, dramatic Bollywood rewatches. But when a friendship just fades? You're supposed to pretend it's fine. You're supposed to keep liking their posts.
Sitting on that LES rooftop, I felt the whole thing at once — the love that was real, and the distance that's also real. Both true. Both quietly heartbreaking.
I've been thinking about it since. Some people come into your life for a specific season. She was my landing gear when I first moved here, terrified and jetlagged and homesick. She got me through it. And maybe that was the whole point of us. Maybe not every friendship is supposed to last forever, and that doesn't make it a failure.
My mummy always says people are like seasons — some are summers, some are winters, and you can't be angry at a season for ending.
We hugged goodbye at the elevator. A real hug. And I walked down to the Delancey Street station feeling lighter and sadder at the same time, which I'm learning is just what growing up feels like.
I'm not going to force the group chat back to life. I'm going to let it be a beautiful thing that happened.
Some people are chapters, not the whole book. Thank them, and turn the page.
Love,