My best friend Aditi moved to Williamsburg last month, and I have been quietly grieving it like a small breakup.
We lived together for two years in a shoebox in the East Village. Two Gujarati girls, one bathroom, and a shared understanding that dal at 1am is a legitimate emotional support system. Then her lease ended, her rent went up, and Brooklyn called with cheaper walls.
Now she's a whole L train away. Which, if you've ever waited for the L on a weekend, you know is basically another time zone.
Here's the thing nobody warns you about adult friendship in NYC. It's not the big fights that end things. It's the geography. It's the slow math of who's willing to travel. It's realizing that a friend twenty minutes away and a friend forty-five minutes away are treated by your brain like entirely different categories of person.
I was scared this move would quietly kill us. That we'd become birthday-text friends. That the intimacy we built over shared groceries and split heartbreaks would thin out over the distance.
So I did something about it. I got on the L, transferred, cursed the MTA, and showed up at her new place in Williamsburg on Saturday with a bag of the specific Parle-G biscuits she likes and no announcement.
And it was exactly the same. We made chai in her new kitchen, sat on her floor because the couch hadn't arrived, and gossiped for four hours like we'd never lived apart. She showed me the spot on Bedford Avenue where she gets her morning coffee. I approved of it grudgingly.
What I learned about friendship, the real kind, is that it doesn't actually need a shared address. It needs a shared willingness to keep showing up. To cross the borough. To ride the terrible L train because the person on the other end is worth the transfer.
In every Bollywood movie the friendship is easy, guaranteed, sworn in a song. Real friendship is quieter. It's you deciding, over and over, that this person is worth the inconvenience.
She's coming to my place next weekend. She promised. I'm making dal.
Distance only wins if you let it. I'm not letting it.
Love,