My oldest friend in this city and I split a paper dosa in the East Village on Sunday, and somewhere between the sambar and the second filter coffee I realized we've done this for four years.
Her name is Priya. We met at a mixer for South Asian creatives that we both attended reluctantly, standing by the snacks table, both pretending to check our phones. She said something dry about the cheese cubes and that was that.
Since then I have moved apartments three times. Astoria to a sublet in the LES to my current place near the Jefferson stop in Bushwick. Every move, I was sure a few friendships wouldn't survive the change in commute. New York friendships are geographic. You love people until the L is running local on weekends and then you love them from afar.
But Priya kept showing up. That's the whole secret. She just kept showing up.
We have a place. A tiny South Indian spot near St. Marks with plastic chairs and the best dosa outside my mother's kitchen, and it's exactly halfway-ish between our lives if you squint. Sunday nights. We don't even confirm anymore. We just go.
On Sunday she told me she might move to Chicago for a job. And I felt that lurch, that specific NYC dread, because a friendship that survived me moving to Bushwick might not survive an actual timezone.
But then she said, we did four years of Sundays, Pooja, we can do FaceTime Sundays. And I believed her, because she's the kind of person who means the small promises.
Here is what I've learned. In a city this big and this fast, the friendship that lasts isn't the loudest one. It's the one made of repetition. Same dosa. Same chairs. Same complaining about the same trains.
My Nani used to say you can count your real friends on one hand and still have fingers left over. She was right, as usual.
I have Priya, and a couple of fingers left over.
Some people you keep by simply, stubbornly, showing up.
Love,