My oldest friend flew in from Ahmedabad this week and I have not stopped talking since. My throat hurts. It's the good kind.
We met when we were nine. She knows versions of me that predate everything — the fashion degree, the New York of it all, the woman who cries at Astoria laundromats. She knew me before I had a personality to perform.
I took her straight to the Lower East Side because I wanted to show her the New York I actually live in, not the postcard one. We walked from the Delancey J stop and got soup dumplings and then stood on a corner near Orchard Street arguing about which of us was more dramatic as teenagers. (Her. Objectively her.)
Here's the thing about a friendship that survives an ocean and a two-year gap: it doesn't need warming up. There's no catching-up small talk, no polite scaffolding. You just pick the sentence back up mid-word.
With new friends here — and I have good ones, genuinely — there's always a little translation happening. Explaining a reference, softening a joke, contextualizing my whole self. With her, I could say one word in Gujarati and she'd fold over laughing on an LES sidewalk while strangers stepped around us.
That's what I miss most, I think. Not being explained. Just being known.
We walked until 2am, from the Lower East Side up through the quiet parts, past shuttered bodegas and one very persistent halal cart. She held my arm the whole way like we were still nine and crossing a busy road in Ahmedabad.
She leaves Sunday. I'm already dreading the apartment's quiet after.
But some friendships don't need daily maintenance. They just need one long walk every couple of years to remember they were never really gone.
Keep the friends who don't need translating. They're the ones who'll fly across the world just to argue with you on a street corner.
Love,