My best friend Anaya and I had our first real fight last week, on the 2 train somewhere between Chambers and Harlem, and I am only now able to write about it.
We don't fight. That was the whole problem. For two years we've been so careful with each other, so polite, the way you are when a friendship feels too good to risk. And politeness is its own kind of distance.
It started over something stupid — it always does — me cancelling plans last minute for the third time, her finally saying she was hurt, me getting defensive on a crowded train because there is nowhere worse to have feelings than the 2 train at rush hour.
We got off at 135th Street still arguing, walked half a block apart, and then just stopped on the corner near the Schomburg and looked at each other and I started crying, because I realized I was about to lose someone over my own inability to just say I'm sorry, I've been overwhelmed, I should have told you.
Here's what I'm learning about friendship as an adult, far from home, building a life from scratch. The real ones aren't the ones who never disappoint you. They're the ones who stay after you've shown them your messy, defensive, badly-coping self and they don't flinch.
Anaya didn't flinch. She hugged me on that Harlem corner and said, "I'm not going anywhere, you idiot, I just need you to talk to me."
In India, friendship felt easier because everyone had known me forever. Here, every friendship is a choice made by two people with no shared history, no family connecting them, no reason to stay except that they want to. That's terrifying. It's also the most honest kind of love there is.
We got dinner after. Ethiopian, on Lenox, eating with our hands, which felt right — the way I'd eat at home. We talked for three hours. The fight didn't break the friendship. It deepened it. It turns out friendship that can survive a fight on the 2 train is the only kind worth having.
I walked her to her train and we hugged like we meant it this time.
Tell your person the truth before the silence does it for you.
Love,