My best friend Meera lives off the Bedford L in Williamsburg, in an apartment so small the kitchen and the living room are technically a rumor.
This week I had the kind of bad few days that don't have a headline. Work stress, a guy who left me on read, the general exhaustion of being a person. So I took the L over after work even though the L always betrays you, and I showed up at her door slightly unraveled.
She didn't ask what was wrong. She just put water on for Maggi.
We ended up on her kitchen floor at midnight, the way we always do, two bowls of two-minute noodles that took fifteen minutes because we were too busy talking. Backs against her cabinets. The Bedford L rumbling somewhere underneath us.
This is what nobody tells you about friendship in your twenties in a city like this. The rare ones, the real ones, they don't need you to be impressive. Meera has seen me cry over things I'm embarrassed about. She's seen me at my pettiest and my most dramatic, full "Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham" energy, and she just hands me a fork.
We've known each other since the FIT days. We've survived three breakups between us, two terrible roommates, one lease we cosigned and regretted, and that whole panicked season when everyone swore the L train was shutting down forever.
The friendship that survives all that is not loud. It's the one that meets you on the kitchen floor at midnight and asks nothing of you but your honest face.
Around 1AM I felt human again. Not fixed. Just less alone, which is most of what fixed actually means.
I took the L home. It was delayed, obviously. I didn't mind.
Find the person who makes you Maggi and asks no questions, and then never let her move out of the city.
Love,