No sorry, no thank you.
If we never met, my Lahore would be just Lahore (or DHA, specifically) and my playlist, vocabulary, and local pop culture knowledge would be severely lacking (thank you). But now, ‘home’ travels across cities, countries, continents. 5 minutes away, 20 minutes away, 5000km away. To find someone who gets angry every time you say sorry or thank you is to find someone who doesn’t want to be appreciated or acknowledged for what they do for you - simply being able to do is enough for them. To find someone who you can mindlessly double text, triple text, quadruple text, use as a journal or voice note dump (minimum 3 minutes and maximum, until you stop making sense and start repeating) is to find someone who does nothing but make sense of your convoluted thoughts and echo them back to you in a way that’s just logical. To find someone who picks up your FaceTime call the first ring no matter what they’re doing, just to say hi, is to find someone who appreciates your mere presence without needing anything else. To find someone who knows you’re looking at them during a specific moment in a Zoom call is to find someone you can connect with across oceans and eras. This is not the most eloquent or the most poetic, but in the midst of the Big Things and Life Events and Current Affairs, romanticizing friendship and warm moments and a joke that never made sense again after that first laugh is what keeps me together through it all. And if life happens, at no one’s fault, and the monster that is time blurs the visions of Thursday nights, Friday mornings and every hour spent in between, I hope hearing our song brings you back to the days when nothing mattered except agreeing on where to have dinner. Even if the details are fuzzy, if you don’t remember who was there on a specific night, if the timelines start to melt into one, the idea that it happened is enough. But right now - technology has bridged the gaps we didn’t even know we had and for that, 2020 has been kind, and even enlightening. As we travel miles into the future together, it’s comforting to have people who knew you “way back when”. (PS: this is as close as I can get to a thank you without saying thank you - because “dosti mein, no sorry, no thank you”.)