Priya and I got stuck on the L train Thursday night for ninety minutes. Between Bedford and First Avenue, that dark tunnel under the river, no signal, no explanation, just the conductor sighing over the intercom like even he had given up on his dreams.
And I want to tell you it was awful. But the friendship that survived the L train delay actually got stronger down there in the dark.
We'd been at a work thing in Williamsburg, the kind of event where everyone's networking so hard you can smell the ambition. Priya and I had spent the whole night doing our polite faces. So when the train stopped, something in both of us just dropped.
We started talking for real. Not the surface stuff. She told me she'd been thinking about moving back to Chicago. I told her I hadn't cried to my mother in three weeks because I was scared of what would come out. We were basically doing group therapy for a train car full of exhausted strangers.
I've known Priya for two years but the friendship that survived the L train delay is the one that started that night, honestly. There's something about being trapped with someone that strips the performance away. You can't be your curated self when you're sweating underneath the East River wondering if you'll ever see grass again.
We made a whole plan for our lives down there. Half of it was a joke. Half of it wasn't. She's going to visit me in Ahmedabad someday. I'm going to be her maid of honor even though she's not engaged. We decided all of this at 8:40 pm between two stations.
When the train finally moved, the whole car cheered. We got out at First Avenue and got dumplings and didn't talk about it. We didn't have to.
Some people you meet. Some people you get stuck with. The second kind stays.
Love,