Riya and I climbed onto her building's roof in DUMBO on Thursday with a bottle of $9 wine from the bodega and no glasses.
Riya was my first friend in New York. We met three years ago at a folding-table orientation thing, both new, both pretending we knew how to read a subway map. She took the A, I took the 2, and somehow we found each other in the middle.
From her roof you can see the Manhattan Bridge frame a slice of the skyline, that famous view everyone photographs from Washington Street. But we weren't looking at the postcard part. We were passing the bottle and watching the sun turn the bridge gold.
We talked about how much has changed. Three years ago I cried in a Trader Joe's because I couldn't find the right lentils. Now I have a job, a lease, a subway line I call mine. Riya's about to move in with her boyfriend. We're not the same terrified girls from the folding table.
There's a specific kind of love for the friends who knew you before you got good at your own life. Riya remembers the version of me that didn't understand tipping and thought the F train and the 4 train were the same thing. She loved that girl too. That's the thing.
A DUMBO rooftop at golden hour makes you sentimental, I know. But I think we don't say this enough to the people who stayed: thank you for being here for the boring middle part. Not the arrival, not the big wins. The Tuesdays.
We stayed till the streetlights came on and the wine was gone and my legs were cold. Then we took the F back to our separate lives, which are somehow still braided together.
Keep the friends who knew you when. They're the whole point.
Love,