I remember I couldn’t cry without thinking of her. It’s not that she’s a terrible person. That’s simply just not the case. To be honest, she’s the kindest little white girl I know. Savannah Kassady was simple and complicated all at once. The kind of simple that meant I could give her a run-of-the-mill bouncy ball for Christmas and she would be all kinds of completely happy. And the kind of complicated that physically caused a migraine.

In one way or another I had been emotionally stunted ever so oddly that nothing could make me cry, and I really did want to cry. Savannah Kassady, she was the exception.

Our friendship was impermeable. Something clicked the moment we realized we were each other’s heading to high school. Something chemically irreversible took place the night we called till 5 in the morning the summer before freshman year.

I told her about the emptiness I felt going home to India and watching the homeless children carry their siblings because they were all each other had. She told me about the way her brother always, without fail, had run into the dirt after a thunderstorm, to cover himself in mud. I could tell we thought the real details of our life weren’t too valuable until we had shared them with each other.

Her kindness, in a way, was astonishing. The universe just seemed to constantly conspire against her. It felt hopeful and at the same time had me disappointed in the rest of humanity. It’s probably very unfair for me to compare everyone else in the world to someone so kind-hearted. She took it upon herself to save everyone- and somewhere along the way she saved me then never stopped.

In a world that constantly created an unsafe space for someone who thinks so rapidly and anxiously, I was her safety blanket. She made me cry because the universe felt unmitigatedly cruel. Only bad things happened to good people. The ignorance and arrogance of the world, they never got what was coming to them. I cried because the world was so cyclical and uncensored in its irreverence towards the most empathetic people. I cried enough tears to choke on them. For her, for me, for us. I cry and hope for a future where to be unapologetically human isn’t prosecuted.