My best friend and I almost fell apart on a bench in Tompkins Square Park this week, and I've been chewing on it ever since.
We met three years ago, both of us fresh and broke and clinging to each other because that's what you do when you move to a city that doesn't know your name. She held my hand through my first breakup. I held hers through her worst job. We were, for a long time, each other's whole New York.
But something's been off. She got a serious boyfriend, I got busier with work, and slowly the texts got shorter. This week she said something in the park — near the dog run, of all the romantic locations — about how I never make time anymore. And I got defensive because the truth stings when it's accurate.
We sat in that specific silence that only exists between people who love each other and are both a little bit right.
Here's what I'm learning about adult friendships: they don't end in fireworks. They just quietly stop being watered until one day you look and the plant is brown. Tompkins Square Park is where we figured out we didn't want that to happen. Neither of us said it dramatically. We just sat there, and eventually she offered me half her iced coffee, and I took it, and that was the apology and the acceptance all at once.
In Hindi there's a warmth in the word apnapan — a belonging, a sense of someone being your own. That's what I don't want to lose with her. Not the daily texts. The apnapan.
We walked out of the park onto Avenue A and made a plan for actual dinner, an actual date, phones down. We'll see if we keep it. Friendship at 24 is mostly just the promise to keep showing up even when it gets boring and hard.
The ones worth keeping are the ones you fight for on a park bench.
Love,