Eighteen.

Yin and yang is a joke I would make about our relationship, if only I wasn't already Chinese.

When I lived in the East Village, I shared an apartment with Yin, my then-best friend, who I'd known since our freshman year in college. We had attended the same program within our university—an interdisciplinary curriculum with an emphasis on individualized education—and virtually came of age together.

We met at a small party during spring break of 2012, but didn't hit it off right away. I remember finding her to be reserved, quiet and less easily amiable as her other Hong Kong friend, who was also in attendance. But, repeated hangouts did the trick, as we were all newcomers to New York without any local anchors, and I soon found myself spending all of my time with her. In Yin, I found a kindred spirit, familiarly foreign because we were ethnically and homosexually similar yet of different varieties: I was a gay boy from Los Angeles; she was a lesbian from Hong Kong.

I was deeply fascinated by her. She was my introduction to Grimes and Beach House and all the music that I'd never before heard, and she always knew what to order at the Japanese restaurants we began to frequent. She was rebelliously independent, whether attending underground concerts somewhere out in Brooklyn or reading philosophers (Freud was her favorite) and modern culture critics that laid out all the possible ways that the world not just was, but could be. Of all my peers, she was the one who had the most formidable impact on my intellectual development, introducing me to Judith Butler and Jasbir Puar before even my professors did. To me, she was effortlessly cool.

I think I was annoying. Part of why I chose to attend college in New York was that I wanted to escape my parents, and the core of that logic is that I wanted a chance to find out who I was without external controls. Practicing independence meant living without having parental figures nearby to whom I could run if anything went wrong, and college was a safety net there for me if ever my mistakes led me awry. Still, I felt the weight of my choices, and I desperately craved that gravity because I wanted to grow up a little bit faster, because I'd spent my teenage years in a bubble of a suburb of Los Angeles, where I was incubated for college acceptances and nothing else. Attending a magnet high school resulted in me feeling anything but normal, and I knew that I needed to be properly socialized. I think I was annoying because I'd spent six years of my life in a school where it felt like all we were allowed to care about was studying hard and getting good grades—which are, yes, important, but still I felt stifled, surrounded by all the academic excellence and geniuses against whom I didn't match up. Thus, when I met Yin, I was still trying to figure out how to behave.

She was my best friend. I didn't make any decisions without first consulting her. I imagined that that was how normal people relied upon their siblings; I imagined that she was sort of my (dizygotic) twin. Within the same year that we'd met, it was in her kitchen where I was sat when I began the fraught, tentative negotiations that precipitate first-time dating as I was wooed by the man who would become my very first boyfriend. (She advised me on my every response; my then-boyfriend later told me he'd wondered, as my messages lagged, "Why is he taking so long to reply?") We purchased cheap Rieslings and spirits, mixed bad homemade sangria, and spent night after night playing mahjong and billiards together.

Through Yin, I became acquainted with Hong Kong. She and her friends regaled me with stories from their times as students at a girls' school, growing up in one of the world's densest metropolises. Over winter break, I accompanied them back to their city, which I came to see through their eyes. (For the briefest of moments, I was a neighbor of Jackie Chan.) With them, I ate true Cantonese-style dim sum, I scaled Victoria Peak, and I marveled at the efficiencies of their subway compared to New York's. I'd technically traveled the world with her, and that made me trust her all the more.

Yin was one of the few people I relied upon during my first breakup. Though our friendship had lulled around that time, we reconnected over my loss, the end of the relationship that she'd helped me to foster. Though I didn't know how to process such a loss, she dragged me out of my stupor and forced me to interact with the world, to continue on with life; the precedents she set for me during that first breakup have since become weighty and constitutive.

I think that I trusted her so much because our formative experiences were so intertwined. After she moved out of the dormitories into her own apartment, I spent all of my free time there. I knew all her doormen; I would walk in without having to announce myself, and I'd irritate her to no end by commandeering the aux cord to her stereo system so that I could play Carly Rae Jepsen songs on repeat. I would pick through her jewelry until I found the thick silver band that I always borrowed. (After our separation, I would later take myself up to the Diamond District, where I purchased one in tribute to hers that I now customarily wear exclusively on my fourth finger.) Where she was laconic, I was loquacious, and every Thursday evening after class I invited myself over just to invite her outside. She would say that she wanted to stay in, but within the hour we'd find ourselves doing pickleback shots until we had enough liquid courage to venture out to the West Village.

The West Village was where we spent most of our free nights for two reasons: proximity and queerness. It was our entry point to another world, one that compulsory heterosexuality did not dominate, and crossing Sixth Avenue those evenings felt like entering another dimension through a nondescript portal unnoticed by most. I always accompanied her to the Hot Rabbit parties at Monster at the end of each week, and I always made her accompany me to the drag shows at Boots & Saddle where we knew Yuhua Hamasaki (pre-RuPaul's Drag Race) performed. (A decade later, Yuhua was hired by my company to give a talk on diversity, and I afterwards went up to her to reminisce about the days in which Yuhua and Yin would amiably cuss at each other in Cantonese almost every week.) I would go to Cubbyhole and Henrietta Hudson with her, where I imagined she'd meet some hot lesbian and where I invariably was the one doing the hooking up, tipsily making out with a cute bisexual Latvian man who claimed to walk Mariah Carey's dogs on one such occasion (Facebook later informed me that he's since happily become a father with a woman).

When we graduated, I sat next to her in the stands at Yankee Stadium. After the graduation ceremony, it seemed as though everyone else already had plans or places to be; she and I stood awkwardly outside the stadium with our parents before we ultimately decided to take the 4 train back down to a restaurant in Chinatown. Our parents quarreled in good nature over who had the honor of paying the dinner bill; I think my mom allowed herself to lose. I think my mom thought she was my girlfriend, a notion I did no work to dispel because I hadn't yet come out to my parents.

In 2015, the lease on my Lower East Side apartment lapsed, and we decided to move in together. I would later come to view that year as one of my happiest, despite it being the year where it all went wrong.

We found a newly remodeled two-bedroom apartment on 7th Street, and I negotiated down the rent by a whopping fifty dollars per month for us. We hosted our first Friendsgiving, and my second boyfriend cooked a turkey. Indeed, between him virtually living with us and her other best friend, a photographer who'd also gone to college with us, being a constant presence, it felt like we had established our own happy family. I was there when she came out to her brother, whose response—"Now we both have something in common!"—I still remember because it cracked us up, because we were each nursing pints of beer at a Japanese gastropub, because we wondered whether he was gay too. ("We both like girls," he'd finished his sentence, after an agonizingly long pause.)

I'm choosing to gloss over our falling out because I don't like to remember it. I don't like to remember the icing each other out, the acrimonious text messages, and what I did in the fallout of losing my best friend. I felt betrayed, so I in turn betrayed her, and it's a chasm that will never be bridged.

In the years since, I've never met anyone that could so capably encapsulate in one person all that she was to me. It's entirely reasonable that I haven't, that I won't—if every individual is a universe, the void she left in my life was bigger than any that could be engendered by even a supermassive black hole. There have been people who have taken up the burden of shouldering bits and pieces of the weight she carried, but that only illustrates the point all the more: no one could, would, should replace her. She was one of my everythings, and now I'm one everything short.

Yin had been with me through my first two successive boyfriends. She'd seen my evolution from an awkward teenager to a self-assured young adult; indeed, she was disproportionately responsible for it. As I later processed my worst breakup ever during my year without water, I wondered to my therapist whether her disappearance was my original loss, the big one from which all my later grief stemmed, and whether my lack of having processed that loss was contributing to my continued state of emotional decline. I'd never properly mourned her, you see. When she left my life, I obstinately remained angry until my anger no longer mattered, and when that finally happened my life became preoccupied with other matters. I never had the time to grieve. As I missed the ex-boyfriend who'd so willingly and determinedly walked out of my life, so too did I find myself missing her.

Wherever she is now, I hope she's happy. I'm sorry for the way things ended between us, and I do wish they had never taken place, and I wonder what restitutions could even be made now, when it all is no longer significant. I've since chosen to interpret her parting as her final, ultimate life lesson for me: to not take anyone for granted, to not let a relationship get so bad that it becomes beyond repair, and to let my loved ones know, over and over, that they are loved. It is a weight that I, myself, will forever shoulder.