I took the J train all the way out to Bushwick this weekend to help my friend Anjali move into her third apartment in three years, and somewhere between the boxes I realized she's family now.
The J is a forgotten train. Nobody romanticizes the J. It rattles over the Williamsburg Bridge and you get that flash of the whole skyline, sudden and free, and then it descends back into Brooklyn and everyone forgets it exists. But I've ridden it so many times to her place that it feels like mine.
We met three years ago at a sample sale, both of us reaching for the same impossible blazer. Classic. We've helped each other move every single time since — DUMBO when she could barely afford it, then Crown Heights, now Bushwick off the Halsey stop.
Making friends as an adult in NYC is brutal. Everyone's busy, everyone's leaving, everyone's one bad lease away from moving back to wherever they came from. The friendships that survive are the ones where someone shows up with a box cutter and doesn't complain about your books.
We ordered biryani from the Pakistani place she swears by, ate it sitting on the floor surrounded by chaos, and talked the way you only can with someone who's seen you cry over a man who didn't deserve it.
There's a Hindi word my mom uses — apnapan. That feeling of someone being yours, of belonging. There's no clean English version. It's not just friendship. It's the person who knows how you take your chai and which subjects to avoid before noon.
Anjali is my apnapan in this city. The J train friend. The one who stays.
We didn't finish unpacking. We never do. But she had her bed assembled and a candle lit by the time I left, and she walked me back to the J like always, and we hugged for one second too long.
The friendships that survive three apartments and the J train are the ones worth building a whole life around.
Text the friend who helped you move. They already know why.
Love,