Wednesday night I was on a rooftop in Harlem with Devika and two warm beers, and I thought: oh, this is it. This is the family I built.
Devika and I met three years ago in line for a sample sale in the Garment District, both reaching for the same emerald top, both refusing to let go. We split a coffee instead of fighting. We've been splitting things ever since — rent stress, breakups, the last samosa, the weight of being far from everyone who knew us as girls.
Her cousin has this building near 145th Street, and the roof looks out over a Harlem that's all golden in June. The kind of summer evening that makes you forgive the city for January.
We didn't do anything. That's the point. We sat. We talked about nothing — a coworker, a guy she's not texting back, whether we'd ever actually move back to India or just keep saying we might. We sang an old Kishore Kumar song badly, the one her father used to play, and neither of us knew all the words and it didn't matter.
Friendship in New York City is a strange and precious thing. Everyone's busy. Everyone's broke. Everyone's one bad month from moving home. So when someone keeps showing up — when someone takes the 1 train forty minutes just to sit on a roof with you — that's not casual. That's a vow.
I used to think family was only blood. Only the people back in Ahmedabad who watched me grow up. But here's what living far away taught me: family is also Devika handing me her jacket when the breeze turned, without asking, the way you'd cover someone you love.
We stayed till the sky went fully dark and the Bronx lit up across the way. I felt held. Not by a person, exactly. By a life I'd somehow stumbled into building.
The friendship that stays is the whole prize. The rest is just weather.
Call the person who'd come sit on a roof with you. Then go sit.
Love,