I met an old friend for coffee in the West Village this week, the kind of friend you've been slowly drifting from, and we finally said it out loud.
Her name doesn't matter here. What matters is we were two of the first friends I made when I moved to New York, back when everything was terrifying and we clung to each other like the F train handrail at rush hour.
Then life did what life does. She moved uptown. I got busy with work. The group chat got quieter. A drifting friendship doesn't die dramatically. It just gets returned fewer times.
We sat at that little cafe on Bleecker with the sidewalk tables, the one where a latte costs an ungodly amount and you pay it anyway for the privilege of watching the West Village pretend it's a movie.
And she said, softly, I feel like I lost you. And I said, I feel like I let you go without meaning to. Both true.
Here's what nobody tells you about a drifting friendship. There's often no villain. No fight. Nobody did anything wrong. You just both kept choosing other things until the choosing became a habit.
In Hindi there's this weight to the word apnapan, that feeling of someone being your own. I realized I still felt it for her. I'd just stopped acting like it.
So we did the unglamorous work. We admitted the drifting. We laughed about how we'd both been telling ourselves the other was too busy. We made an actual plan, not a fake we-should-hang-soon.
The West Village was showing off around us, the townhouses, the good light, someone's dog in a sweater in September, which is insane.
A drifting friendship can be caught, I think, if you're honest before the rope runs out. Not every one. But some.
We hugged on the corner of Christopher Street a long time. Longer than the coffee deserved. Long enough to feel like an apology and a promise at once.
Some people are worth the awkward conversation. Text her first.
Love,