Best friends since freshman year of college.
Dear Priya,
I'm writing this on the kitchen floor of an apartment you've never been to, drinking the kind of cheap red wine you used to make fun of me for buying.
The IKEA bowl is here, by the way. The blue one with the chip on the rim. It came with me from Fishtown to my first place in Bushwick to here. I almost threw it out twice. I never did. You should know that — it's important later.
You laugh louder when Devin is in the room. You don't even know you do this. I noticed it the first time at that terrible brunch place in Old City — the one with the rude server — and I thought, oh. There she is. The version of her that wasn't around when she was twenty-two. I have wanted that for you for so long it almost hurts to see it.
You stopped apologizing for the wrong things. Remember when you used to say sorry for crying? For being tired? For taking up space in your own life? You don't do that anymore. I noticed it last March on the phone, and I sat in my car in a Wegmans parking lot and cried. No good reason. Or at least not one I could explain at the time.
About sophomore year. I have never properly thanked you for that February. I'm not going to do it in this letter either, because it would embarrass you, and because some debts you carry forward and don't pay back. But you should know that every good thing in my life — the apartment, the work, the people, this stupid wine — runs through that one night you stayed up with me. You are the reason I'm here to write this. I don't mean that figuratively.
You're not losing me. Or at least — I'm not going anywhere. I know you've been worried about it in some quiet way. I've felt it. I'm bad at long-distance and worse at marriages-of-best-friends — I don't have a template for what we are about to be. But Priya, I have kept a chipped IKEA bowl across three apartments and one breakup. I am not the kind of person who lets go of the important things. You can trust me on this.
Devin is good. He looks at you the way I always hoped someone would. I am giving you to him today the way you give someone a thing you love — carefully, and with the understanding that they had better be worthy of it.
He seems to be. Most days, anyway.
I love you. Go get married.
Yours, Maya
