There is something deeply unserious and deeply emotional about accidentally turning LinkedIn into a Punjabi millennial missed-connections archive.
A professional networking platform somehow becoming the place where I attempt to reconnect with the boy who taught my nervous system what love felt like in fourth grade.
And honestly?
That feels very millennial.
Because millennials are probably the last generation that truly understands what it meant for someone to disappear forever while still being alive.
Not death.
Not drama.
Not betrayal.
Just… gone.
A new country.
A new school.
A disconnected home phone.
No Instagram.
No Snapchat.
No usernames.
No DMs.
No way to find each other again.
People today forget how permanent childhood loss used to feel before social media.
Especially for immigrant kids.
Especially for children who were already being emotionally uprooted every couple years by adults who kept making life-changing decisions around them without ever stopping to ask:
“How is this affecting the child?”
I think about JD at least once a year.
Not obsessively.
Not in some tragic romance movie kind of way.
More like:
I’ll be drinking tea.
Reading something.
Walking somewhere.
Watching a tall skinny brown guy cross the street.
And suddenly:
him.
Like a ghost memory.
Not haunting me negatively.
Just… unfinished.
JD was my fourth-grade best friend.
Or first love.
Or soulmate.
Or childhood husband.
Whatever label exists for the first person who makes you feel emotionally safe before you even understand what emotional safety is.
When I moved schools in fourth grade, I didn’t know anybody.
I had moved out of my grandparents’ house by then and into my dad’s family’s house. One of those overcrowded immigrant family homes where cousins are basically siblings and everybody is surviving on top of each other emotionally.
Before that, I had been raised mostly by my mom’s side of the family.
My grandmother would wake me up every morning.
Make sure I ate breakfast.
Braid my hair beautifully.
Walk me to school.
She didn’t speak English.
Didn’t have much money.
Babysat half the neighborhood for extra cash.
But she loved me properly.
Then suddenly I was living in a rougher environment.
A louder environment.
A more emotionally neglectful environment.
I begged to move in with my cousins because I thought it would be fun.
I just wanted friends.
I wanted to belong somewhere.
I wanted to be part of something.
I didn’t realize children can accidentally volunteer themselves into emotional hardship because they’re too young to understand what safety actually is.
My cousins were all boys.
Tough boys.
Pull-up bars.
Push-up contests.
Boxing.
Early 2000s rap and MTV culture.
Rough neighborhood energy.
And I adapted fast.
But I was still soft underneath.
And that’s when JD showed up.
Every day after school, me, my cousin, and JD would walk home together.
That was our thing.
The three of us walking home.
I think that’s where my entire romantic blueprint was born.
Not in adulthood.
Not from movies.
Not from dating.
Walking home.
My teacher used to give out sour peach candies during spelling competitions.
I was really good at spelling.
So I’d win a bunch of candies and save them for later because I liked making things last.
My cousin would always try stealing them from me after school.
First intimidation.
Then sweet-talking.
“Come onnnn, just give me one.”
And I’d start folding because I was a soft kid.
Then suddenly JD would step in immediately:
“No. Leave her alone. She earned those.”
And what’s funny is my cousin was physically tougher than JD.
My cousins grew up rough.
Strong.
Confrontational.
But JD?
JD acted like he had bulletproof skin whenever it came to defending me.
That boy had courage.
Real courage.
The kind where someone doesn’t care who gets annoyed at them.
Doesn’t care if it’s uncomfortable.
Doesn’t care if they have to stand between you and the world for a second.
He would literally push my cousin aside with his tall skinny little body like:
“Go away. Let her enjoy her candy.”
And if I tried giving the candy away anyway because I felt guilty, he’d look at me and go:
“You don’t have to give people things just because they ask.”
Do you understand how insane it is that a fourth-grade boy taught me boundaries before most adult men ever did?
That’s masculine energy to me.
Not dominance.
Not aggression.
Not intimidation.
Protection without ego.
Gentleness with courage.
Quiet loyalty.
A skinny little brown boy standing between me and humiliation saying:
“No. She earned that.”
That’s masculinity to me.
The purest version of it, honestly.
And that’s why it took me thirty-one years to realize something massive:
I don’t actually have a “type.”
My nervous system learned love through one specific boy.
And my body kept trying to relocate that feeling in adulthood.
That’s why I became obsessed with tall skinny lanky brown men.
Not because they were JD.
Because they resembled the shell my nervous system associated with safety.
Tall.
Skinny.
Lanky.
Medium brown skin.
A certain walk.
A certain energy.
And every time a man looked like him, my nervous system would go:
There. There he is.
Even when it wasn’t him at all.
That’s the heartbreaking part.
Some of the men I felt most magnetized toward in adulthood were absolutely nothing like JD emotionally.
But visually?
They activated the blueprint.
And because looks arrive before personality does, my body would recognize the shell before my soul had enough information to recognize incompatibility.
That realization changed everything for me.
Because now I understand:
I wasn’t chasing the body.
I was chasing the emotional ecosystem.
Protectiveness.
Emotional bravery.
Gentleness.
Being chosen naturally.
Being defended without humiliation.
Walking beside me instead of overpowering me.
That’s what I was actually searching for.
And maybe that’s why certain men had such a strange hold on me later in life.
Not because they were him.
Because some part of me kept whispering:
Maybe this time I found the soul again.
The saddest part of the story is honestly how it ended.
One day while we were walking home from school, JD told me quietly:
“This is the last time I’m gonna see you.”
I remember being confused.
“What do you mean?”
He told me his family was moving away.
And I remember not understanding the concept of another country.
I was a child.
Geography meant nothing to me.
As far as I knew, the world was just my neighborhood.
So I kept asking:
“Okay… but when are you coming back?”
And he kept trying to explain:
“No, like… another country. Really far.”
I still didn’t understand.
Then he finally said:
“I have to get on a plane.”
And that’s when it hit me.
Because I knew what planes were.
I didn’t understand countries.
But I knew planes took people somewhere impossibly far away.
And I remember the silence after that.
That horrible childhood silence where both kids realize something permanent is happening but neither has the emotional language to survive it properly.
And then he was just gone.
That was it.
No closure.
No contact.
No social media.
No reconnecting.
Gone.
I think that kind of loss shaped millennials deeply.
People talk about millennials being nostalgic, anxious, depressed, emotionally attached to memory.
But nobody talks enough about what actually happened to us emotionally.
We were children during an era where adults constantly uprooted us emotionally and expected instant adaptation.
School changes.
Country changes.
Neighborhood changes.
Family instability.
Emotionally unavailable hustle-culture parents.
A lot of immigrant parents genuinely believed survival was enough.
Food.
Shelter.
School.
Discipline.
Meanwhile the child was silently experiencing emotional earthquakes.
“Please don’t make me change schools.”
“Please don’t take me away from my friends.”
“Please let me stay.”
And adults would still do whatever made their own lives easier or more comfortable.
Then later everybody acts shocked millennials became emotionally complicated adults.
Of course we did.
We lost people forever before we even knew how to process grief.
Some of us lost friends to suicide.
Addiction.
Depression.
Disappearance.
And before social media?
Losing someone genuinely meant losing them.
Forever.
That’s why this LinkedIn thing feels emotional to me in a way that’s honestly kind of hilarious.
Because one random Sunday, I made a LinkedIn account to look professional and network and protect myself career-wise.
Then suddenly I’m staring at a profile thinking:
Wait.
Is that him?
And now adult Karny — Freelance Makeup Artist & Marketing Consultant — is accidentally trying to reconnect with fourth-grade heartbreak through a networking platform.
Which sounds exactly like the kind of indie film millennials would cry to.
And maybe he isn’t even the right guy.
Maybe this isn’t JD at all.
But weirdly?
That almost doesn’t matter anymore.
Because I think what I’m really doing is allowing little Karny’s unfinished story to breathe again instead of pretending it never mattered.
And maybe that’s enough.
Closure isn’t always about romance.
Sometimes closure is just finally admitting:
“That little girl loved someone deeply.
And losing him hurt her for real.”
And I think she deserves to be taken seriously.
And if this somehow reaches the real JD one day… thank you.
For the walks home.
For the sour peach candies.
For being kind to little Karny when the world around her felt confusing.
I hope life was kind to you.
And if you ever happen to read this and recognize yourself in it, you already know where to find me.