Roughly around ten days from now, I will be commemorating the five-year anniversary of my move to South Tyrol, a region whose existence was unknown to me until 2018, when I was invited to visit as part of an arts residency. The milestone nature of this moment is hard to sidestep. I remember so clearly the sense of urgency with which I was clearing my apartment back in 2020, the space in Kailash Hills that had been my home, my safe space, the site of my best moments as a host.

I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that since my move here, I have been thriving. Though it was difficult to find avenues for earning an income in the beginning, I was able to rely on my existing networks and find lucrative work. I am now the mother of two lovely children and am perhaps more madly in love with my partner than when we married — six years ago. I have a fabulous job that helps me sustain a decent lifestyle, and I have the opportunity to nurture my passion for teaching and mentoring through my affiliation with the university. I am an even better cook than I was five years ago. The demands of motherhood, coupled with my desire to eat nutritious food, have helped me fine-tune my skills in the kitchen. In a matter of 30 minutes, I can put together a feast.

My successes have come at a huge cost: friendship, more specifically, female friendship. Involuntarily, without quite being aware of it, I have had to sacrifice the intensity of my relationships in order to make a home in this bilingual region. My friends and I belong to a certain sub-generation of millennials who have anxieties around being in touch virtually. Having two kids without a robust support group makes calling my friends out of the blue a challenging experience. Living remotely, in the Alpine part of Italy, makes it difficult for friends to visit, too. I’m lamenting this because this friendship is the one thing that compels many of us to stay put in our lives, especially when we get to our mid-30s or start to make peace with being in our 40s. Most of us tolerate the conditions of our life in big cities because of the precious interactions we have with the people who know us intimately, who would be there for us in a heartbeat, and who constitute our emotional support. When we discuss our reluctance to ‘start over’ in a new place, it is because we are aware of how complicated it is to make friends as you grow older, because the circumstances of our lives change, or because we move into settings where cultural differences can become a barrier to intimacy, besides linguistic hurdles.