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That’s the beauty of siblings, I think. You don’t need words. After growing up in the same dysfunctional household for years, you develop your own special telepathy, your own secret language: of facial expressions only the two of you can read, of inside jokes only the two of you understand, of memories only the two of you share.
On the other hand—marriage would give me instant freedom. If I were married, this lack of autonomy that I, and many South Asian daughters experience throughout their twenties, would finally cease. There’d be no more questioning, no more having to hear passive-aggressive quips about the successes of other kids my age, no more being dragged to dinner parties hosted by relatives my parents didn’t even like. I could finally become my own person, an adult—if and only if I attached myself to a man.
What if it wasn’t that at all? What if love was a patient thing that simply stood at your side, offering you a hand? What if it was all the best of friendships—a partnership, a promise to face the unfeeling world and all its follies together? Or simply the quiet, intimate details of a person, like how their lips part when they sleep, how they take their coffee, their preferences in tea?
New York City thrums with an electric life force that makes the hair on your arms stand on end with anticipation. A city where steel and scuzz come to a crossroads. It’s a city of overwhelming impossibility at every turn: with too many bodies, too much noise—too much of so much. The city will eat you and spit you out, and if you don’t learn how to dance in the stomach of the beast, you won’t make it out alive.
But those people haven’t had life-altering conversations with strangers at a bodega, knowing they would never meet again. Been mesmerized by how the evening light hits the pond in Central Park just right, setting it ablaze in fiery shades of orange. Been lifted by the way a busker’s music echoes in a subway—music in the city’s veins—infusing a shitty, dying day with just a touch of magic.
