When I was still too short to reach the top shelf of the display cabinet in our living room, I believed the meaning of words like “friend” and “friendship” was much simpler. Most of my thoughts were bits of a fantasy — I imagined a friend as someone who would accept me just the way I was. But after I left home and began living alone, my view on friendship began to change…

Nothing lasts forever. Every time I heard that, I’d always mutter back in my head: I know. Over the past few months, my life — and something deep within me — changed more than I could’ve ever imagined. I grew distant from someone I had spent years with. And I parted ways with someone I had spent decades with…

My first apartment in Germany was wrapped in freshly painted, blindingly white walls. That color — so painfully neutral — only came alive when touched by sunlight, but if I was lucky, my room received maybe thirty minutes of sun each day…