The first time I saw her, I decided then and there that she was everything I wanted to be. She wore glittery pink eyeshadow, barely towered over me at 5 feet 3 inches and joked about how she’d only slept three hours the night before. She was a managing editor at The Emory Wheel, something that I aspired to be at the time.
In a lot of ways, I credit her for who I am. All my late-night rants about the patriarchy and colonization and how everything that we experience — everything that we do — is connected to race are all because of her. I’ve learned a lot of lessons from her over the years, but what I will carry with me for the rest of my life is the boldness she embodied.
She is me, but different.
The greatest realization of my life was when I discovered that she was human, that we could disagree. When I first met her, I thought it was incomprehensible that this person — who for so long represented the pinnacle of success — could be flawed and human.
But that made our friendship all the better. Because she is not an out-of-reach, one-sided exploration of perfection. She is the only person for whom I would walk to Clairmont Campus in the dead of night because she wanted to make sugar cookies. She is a person who I feel more intimacy with when I barely graze her shoulder than when I hug anybody else, the one who creates fake emails to prank people we know. She is Cheetah Girls movies, misshapen brownies and a reminder to keep an eye out for Selener. Telling her the things I’ve never whispered out loud feels as easy as breathing.
I am my own person, and I am bold and brave and fearless, but I am also made up of all the people I’ve had the honor to love and be loved by while I was at Emory University. Here are just a few.
She is the only person who could make me laugh during the worst moments of my life. She is easy to love, so easy that sometimes I wonder why out of all of the people on this campus she stuck with me. We cancel shopping plans with each other every other Wednesday, and we buy mugs for soup nights that are years in the making. I am perpetually baffled by the endless clothes she has to return, and she is equally perplexed by my vegetarianism. We make sense.
She is quiet German muttering as we exchange South Asian books on the train ride to Sevilla, Spain — her cheesy rom-com for my novel on infanticide. She texts like most people email, has the strongest moral compass out of everyone I know and is endlessly empathetic. We have no common interests, but we don’t need that. We might have never crossed paths had she not been given a bag of Taco Bell that persuaded her to audition for our dance team, and those $2 burritos made all the difference.
She is the person that was everywhere the moment I stepped on campus: Kaldi’s Coffee, the Best in Show dance performances, my first sociology class, even somehow ending up seated next to each other at convocation. She kept appearing everywhere and anywhere until I finally took the sign — that this person is supposed to be my best friend. She is so intertwined with me that sometimes I forget where one of us begins and the other ends, and she is so different from me that I lay awake thinking how lucky I am that we met. She is the toughest person I know but never lets it dull her joy.
I am made of them and so many more: the late nights in the Wheel offices, the writers and editors who I laughed with for days and argued with for even more. I am projects about modern love and lutalica that are so beautiful I wonder how anyone was ever an opinion editor before them. I am 1963, but I am also laughing with my A&E editors as we write satirical articles about antibodies, the itch in my fingers when I write a breaking news article, the glance up before making an ethical decision. I am all things writing and the Wheel, but I am also so much more than that.
I am all the things I do not want to be, too. The chaos, the pain, the moments that were so harsh and raw that it is difficult to relive even now. Maybe I am even more these things. But still, I can’t bring myself to regret any of it. To everyone who made these past four years what it is — I hope the love I have given you will stay with you for the rest of your life. I know yours will for me.
Brammhi Balarajan is from Las Vegas, Nevada and majored in political science and English and creative writing. As editor-in-chief of The Emory Wheel, she was a national award-winning writer with a national general column writing award and several regional awards with the Society of Professional Journalists.
