My best friend moved to Jersey City on Wednesday and I helped her carry boxes up three flights and then I cried on the PATH train home like a woman in a Karan Johar film.
Everyone kept saying it's so close. It's fifteen minutes. It's basically Manhattan. And technically, yes. The PATH from Grove Street dumps you at 33rd Street before your podcast even loads.
But Neha lived four blocks from me in Astoria for three years. Four blocks. I could show up to her place in slippers holding a Tupperware of dal I'd made too much of. That's the friendship math that actually counts.
My best friend moved to Jersey City and I know I'm being dramatic. She didn't move to Ahmedabad. She didn't move to the moon. She moved across a river I can literally see.
But a river is still a river. Now there's a border between us. A whole other state. A whole other transit card logic that my brain refuses to accept.
We met on the N train in 2022, both of us new, both of us lonely, both of us pretending we weren't. She saw me reading a Bollywood gossip account and just said 'Deepika should never have cut her hair' and that was it. Instant. Sealed.
She was the one who came over the night I didn't get the styling job. Brought samosas from that place on Steinway and let me be ugly-sad on her floor. My best friend moved to Jersey City and took a little of my Astoria with her.
Her new place is beautiful, by the way. Big windows, actual light, a view of the skyline that made me shut up mid-complaint. She's growing up. We both are. That's the part that stings — nothing went wrong. Everything is going right, just further apart.
On the PATH home I texted her: this doesn't count as long distance right. She sent back a voice note laughing, saying I'm insane, saying come Sunday, she'll make maggi.
So I'll take the PATH on Sunday. I'll carry a Tupperware. Some friendships just get a slightly longer commute. They don't get smaller.
Love,