05/05/2026
People say grief is the price of love, and I'm feeling the weight of it now. Growing up with Sahil was an adventure. We were two kids trying to find our way, learn about ourselves and the world around us. Sahil was always there, a constant presence in all the chaos, the fun, the learning. Teachers struggled to keep up with our energy, but Sahil was always right in the thick of it, smiling, alive, and full of life.
What stays with me, looking back across all those years, is how rare it was to ever see him sad. Or angry. Or defeated. While the rest of us moved through the full spectrum of boyhood emotion ,the petty frustrations, the bruised egos, the confusion , Sahil carried something different. A steadiness. A warmth that felt almost unreasonable in how freely he gave it.
His family Had crossed an ocean to build something in a foreign country, to make a life in a place that had no obligation to feel like home. Yet there was nothing in him that reflected that difficulty. He made you feel welcomed. He made you feel known. As if he had always been there, as if he had been waiting for you.
It wasn’t only him , it was his family. There was a wholeness to the world that Sahil came from that made every encounter with them feel like something you wanted to protect. Those memories are not small. They are the kind that sit quietly in you for years, and you only realize their weight when something like this happens.
I remember him pulling up to the college just to check on me. Just to show up. Those gestures, the ones that ask nothing in return, are the ones that outlive everything.
I thought we had more time. That is the thought that sits heaviest. But then I return to what we did have — and it was nothing short of perfect.
The lessons you passed without ever intending to teach. The admiration you drew from everyone around you without ever asking for it. All of it is rushing back to me now, vivid and full, and somewhere inside that flood of memory lives a quiet certainty, that we will see each other again.
And when we do, we will pick up exactly where we left off. The way we always did. Like no time had passed at all.
