I ate lunch alone on the Lower East Side this week, at a counter on Orchard Street, and I want to tell you it was a sad thing but it wasn't. It was one of the better hours of my month.
When I first moved to New York I could not do this. Eating alone felt like a public confession that nobody loved me. I'd scroll my phone the whole time, performing busyness for an audience of nobody. In Ahmedabad you are rarely alone, there is always a cousin, an aunty, a neighbor who appears the moment you sit down. Solitude wasn't a skill I'd needed.
The city taught me. Slowly, the way it teaches everything, by leaving you no choice.
So there I was on Orchard Street with a bowl of something good and a book I wasn't really reading, and I just watched the LES go by through the window. The J rumbling nearby. A man walking three dogs of wildly different sizes. Two girls splitting a single iced coffee and laughing too loud.
I used to think being alone meant being lonely. They are not the same thing. Loneliness is wanting someone there and them not being there. Being alone is just being your own company, and at some point this year I started to actually like that company. She's funny. She orders the right thing. She doesn't rush.
There's a line I think about, the SRK thing, kabhi kabhi kuch jeetne ke liye kuch haarna padta hai. Sometimes to win something you have to lose something. I lost the constant noise of always being around people. I won this, the quiet of a counter on the Lower East Side, a book, my own slow thoughts.
I'm not saying I don't miss having someone across the table. I do. But I'm not waiting for that person to start enjoying my life. The friendship I built with myself in this city is the one that showed up first.
I paid, tipped well, walked out into the heat.
Turns out I'm decent lunch company after all.
Love,