The L was delayed forty minutes on Friday and my best friend Riya sat through every one of them just to make it to dinner with me. That's the whole story. That's the whole love story, actually.
We'd planned this dinner for two weeks. A tiny Sichuan place in the East Village that we've been meaning to try since spring. I got there first and held the table, texting her updates as she sent me photos of a stalled train in a tunnel somewhere under the river.
Stuck between stations, she wrote. Don't you dare order without me.
I didn't. I sat with a pot of tea getting cold, watching the door, and thinking about how far I am from everyone who knew me as a child.
When you move across the world, you leave behind a whole language of being known. The friends who remember your worst haircut. The ones who were there for the crush in eleventh standard.
And then, slowly, terrifyingly, you build it again from scratch. That's what friendship in NYC really is. It's chosen family, assembled out of strangers, one delayed L train at a time.
Riya finally burst through the door forty-three minutes late, sweaty, furious at the MTA, apologizing before she even sat down. And I just looked at her and felt so absurdly grateful I could have wept into the dumpling sauce.
Because she could have bailed. Everyone bails. This city gives people a hundred socially acceptable excuses to cancel, and the subway is the best one of all.
But she didn't. She sat in a dark tunnel for me. She showed up.
We talked for three hours. About her terrible boss, about the boy I'm not texting, about whether we're going to be okay, in the big cosmic sense. We decided probably yes.
That's the thing about the friendships you build far from home. They're not inherited, they're earned. Every showing-up is a small vow.
We walked to the F afterward, arms linked, full of noodles and each other.
Home isn't only a place. Sometimes it's a person who waited out the delay.
Love,