The Red Peeler.

Today I finished reading A Little Life.

A story about four college friends in New York City, but also about Jude, brilliant, damaged, and somehow so much more than any single word could hold. A book filled with people who, at different moments, broke my faith in humanity and then, just as unexpectedly, stitched it back together.

I started it over Thanksgiving break, while visiting Dhruvi and Crains. We went to Lake Tahoe with some of their friends.

I felt out of place.

One of their friends was proposing to her boyfriend. Such a personal moment, on such a personal trip, and I was just… there. I knew Dhruvi and Crains well. I’d met a few people in the group before. Still, I felt like I was intruding on something intimate, something not meant for me. So I read. In the car. In the evenings. Whenever there was space to disappear into the pages. And they let me be.

When I finished the book today, I sat in the quiet of the room for a long time. I don’t know how long. Juhi was asleep in the other room. The house felt still in that particular way it does when you’re alone with a thought you’re not ready to leave yet.

At some point, without deciding to, I stood up and started cooking.

Daal on the stove. Rice rinsed. A few potatoes pulled from the drawer.

I began peeling them.

The motion was smooth and familiar, the peeler moving back and forth without effort, and I didn’t even realize I had started until I noticed it again.

The red peeler.

Dhruvi loved that tiny thing. She bought it when she moved away from home for the first time: from Ahmedabad to Boston. Later, when she moved to Seattle, it went missing. She was genuinely upset. Calling people. Asking them to check their kitchens. Wondering if someone had taken it by mistake. It was never found. And every time she cooked, she mentioned it. How much she missed it.

The next time she went back to Ahmedabad, she brought two red peelers with her. One for Crains’ place. One for her own. Wherever she cooked, the red peeler had to be there.

I lived with her after I graduated, while I was looking for a job. I always felt guilty, about the rent, about the space I took up, about eating meals that weren’t mine to claim. So some days I cleaned. Some days I cooked. Small offerings. A way of saying thank you. And the red peeler was always there, resting in the drawer like it belonged to all of us.

When I finally got a job in Houston, I was deeply sad to leave Seattle, to leave my friends, to leave a city I loved more than I expected to. As I was packing, Dhruvi handed me the red peeler.

I told her I couldn’t possibly take it. I knew how much it meant to her. She said she had one at Crains’ place. She said she barely cooked at her own place anymore. She said it lightly, casually, just enough for me to accept it without arguing, just enough to make the generosity feel easy.

And today, standing in my kitchen, pulled back into the present by the soft scrape of metal against potato, I felt the weight of that gesture again. Her kindness. Her thoughtfulness. The way her love shows up in what she gives. Never measured. Never withheld.

A Little Life is a book about friendship. About the quiet ways people hold each other up when words fail. I think that’s why, after finishing it, I found myself here, peeling potatoes, cooking a simple meal, holding onto something small and red and ordinary that carries so much more than it seems to.