Divya moved back to Mumbai on Thursday.
We met three years ago at a party in Bushwick where neither of us knew anyone and both of us were pretending to be fine. She clocked my discomfort from across the room and just walked over and said, "You also want to leave?" And that was it. That was the whole friendship, right there in the first sentence.
I took her to JFK. We took the E train to the AirTrain because she refused to "waste money on a cab to leave a country." Very Divya. Cheap in the exact way my mother is cheap, which is why I loved her instantly.
At the terminal she hugged me and said something in Hindi that I won't translate because it belongs to us.
Here is a thing nobody tells you about immigrant friendship in a city like New York. The people who become your family are the ones who understand your two selves. The one who orders in a New York accent and the one who calls her mother and becomes a completely different daughter. Divya knew both of mine.
The AirTrain home was the loneliest I've felt in a long time. I watched the planes and thought about how New York City gives you these people and then a job or a visa or a homesickness just takes them away again.
We made a lot of this city ours. The dumpling place on the LES. The bench in Fort Greene Park. The 2am samosas from that spot in Jackson Heights.
Now I have to be in those places alone for a while. Or worse, learn to bring someone new.
We are twelve and a half hours apart now. She'll wake up as I fall asleep. We've already decided we'll voice-note each other into the gap.
Come back and visit me, Div. I saved you a seat on the bench.
Love,