Chapter Sixteen #3
“Oh. Wow.” This time, I averted my eyes. “I mean, wow. Congratulations.”
“And I accepted the offer.”
I hugged her; and not one of the half-assed hugs I gave when a friend I saw frequently approached me with their arms spread out, but a real hug that lasted more than three seconds and included a squeeze and everything.
“Wow. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
“I knew you were destined for greatness. So I can say I’m happy for you, but I’m not at all surprised.”
“Thank you.”
I didn’t know what else to say. My cheeks tickled from the breeze hitting my face. The sun had come out from behind a cloud and I lifted a palm to shield my eyes.
“I thought you were going to Juilliard.”
“I was. And I thought about it, but I don’t know.
I’m just feeling a little tired of New York these days.
Everything here just feels so…commercialized.
Even the things that aren’t supposed to be commercial.
I don’t blame the artists themselves. The city is so expensive that of course you have to care about money.
But I think four years for me here was enough. ”
During freshman year, we liked to look up apartments on StreetEasy together, arguing whether the East Village or Brooklyn was better for a new graduate.
The plan was always that Eunjin would go to Juilliard and I would be at Harvard, so I could visit her on the weekends and sublet the other bedroom when her roommate, another Juilliard student, would go home for the summer.
I couldn’t help it now. The tears fell down my eyes and onto my sweater. A couple even made it to my shoes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my nose with my sleeve. “I’m really not trying to make this about me, I promise. I am so, so, so happy for you. I want you to have everything you could possibly ever want. I’m just sad I’m not going to be able to see you all the time anymore.”
“I know, I know.” She looked down at her feet. “I’m sad about that too.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I mean, I’m not mad or anything. It’s just, I’m surprised you didn’t mention it.”
“I just, I didn’t even know if it was going to be a thing, if I was even going to go.
I applied under the assumption that I’d still choose Juilliard.
But whenever I thought about potentially moving to Austria, I’d get this feeling of fear but also excitement.
And I realized I couldn’t let fear be the reason behind my decision.
So I did another exercise. If I took fear out of the equation, what option would I choose?
And the answer was obvious at that point. ”
“But still, why didn’t you tell me? I mean, you were there with me through all my grad school stuff. I wish I could’ve been there to celebrate your grad school stuff.”
“I know, and I really wanted to tell you, I did. You were the first person I wanted to tell. But I got the acceptance letter around the same time you were hearing back from law schools and I didn’t want to rub it in your face and be like, ‘Oh hey, I got into this awesome program’ while I knew you were still figuring stuff out. ’ ”
“I know I’m crazy jealous and insane, but only about other people. Never about you. You know that.”
“I know. But still, I didn’t want to be insensitive.”
We walked back into the lobby. I offered to buy us two glasses of champagne to celebrate, but she said no. We took the elevator back down to the mall and walked outside.
“Do you have anything to do this afternoon?” she asked. “Maybe we could take a walk on the High Line.”
“Sure,” I said. If I didn’t go home now, I’d need to stay up all night to finish an essay that was due the next day. But it didn’t matter. I would go to the High Line with my best friend.
We headed south on the High Line for a few blocks but found ourselves sandwiched between crowds of slow-walking tourists and their crying children.
So we exited the trail on 23rd Street and started walking on Tenth Avenue instead, stopping by a bookstore, and then an art gallery.
The time passed comfortably, like we were floating along a lazy river, and it was nice to not be going somewhere for once, like the library or class or a club meeting, and instead float through the streets of Chelsea, stopping inside storefronts whenever we wanted to, not because we had to.
I wondered with a deep, aching melancholy how many of these afternoons together we had left.
Eunjin would move to Austria, and we would no longer live next door to each other.
She would make new friends, maybe start dressing or acting differently, and of course the first few months we would talk every day and video chat every week but eventually, our diverging experiences would lead to diverging identities so that we were no longer the two Asian girls from the Dakotas who made it to Columbia University, but a famous world-traveling violinist and a corporate lawyer living in New York City who had overlapped during a four-year stint of their lives.
It was funny how you could go from seeing someone every day to not seeing them at all.
That this friendship, even if it existed in the future, would never exist again in this same form.
That it would just be a single thread among a disparate assortment of embroidery in the comprehensive picture of our lives.
Just a tiny part of a much larger picture.
A part so small and insignificant that when you look at the picture from afar, you may not notice it at all.