The Long Distance

The time difference meant they lived in different days. When Priya woke up, Aisha was already living tomorrow. When Aisha went to sleep, Priya was still stuck in yesterday. They existed in parallel timelines, always reaching for each other across the hours. Priya stared at her phone: 3:47 AM in New Jersey. 1:17 PM in Mumbai. Aisha would be at lunch, surrounded by their friends—no, Aisha's friends now. Priya didn't have friends here yet. Just classmates who smiled politely and spoke too fast. Her phone buzzed. A voice message from Aisha: "Happy birthday, you fool! I can't believe you're sixteen and I have to wait twelve more hours to catch up. Call me when you wake up. I have so much to tell you!" Priya smiled through tears. Aisha always remembered, even with the distance, even with the time zones, even with the new life that must be pulling her in different directions. She called back immediately, forgetting it was the middle of the night. "Couldn't wait?" Aisha's voice was warm, familiar, home. "I can't sleep anyway," Priya admitted. "It's weird being sixteen here when you're still fifteen there. Like I'm living in your future." "Tell me what it's like. Sixteen-year-old Priya. Do you have all the answers yet?" Priya laughed, the sound rusty from disuse. "I don't even have the questions right yet." They talked for two hours. Aisha told stories from school—the new Hindi teacher who couldn't control the class, the monsoon that flooded the library, the boy who'd asked her to the school dance. Priya shared her own struggles—the cafeteria where she ate alone, the classes where she was ahead in math but behind in cultural references, the crushing loneliness of being surrounded by people who didn't know her. "I miss you," Priya whispered. "I miss having someone who gets it." "I'm right here," Aisha said firmly. "Distance doesn't change that." But distance changed everything, Priya thought as the weeks passed. Aisha's stories became harder to follow—they referenced people Priya didn't know, places she couldn't picture, inside jokes she wasn't inside of anymore. And Priya's life was equally foreign to Aisha: American high school with its lockers and homecoming and AP classes. They tried to maintain their rituals. Friday night video calls, even though it meant Priya stayed up late and Aisha woke up early. Daily voice messages, even when they had nothing important to say. Shared playlists, even though their music tastes were diverging. But the gap was growing. Priya could feel it. "I'm losing her," Priya told her mother one evening. Her mother looked up from her cooking—a curry that smelled like Mumbai, like memory. "Friendship isn't about proximity, beta. It's about priority. If you both make each other a priority, you won't lose each other." "But how? We're living completely different lives now." "Then share the differences. Don't try to pretend the distance doesn't exist. Embrace it. Let her into your new life, and find your place in hers." Priya thought about this. She'd been trying to maintain what they had been, to freeze their friendship in amber, to pretend nothing had changed. But everything had changed. She was changing. Aisha was changing. Fighting that seemed futile. What if they changed together instead? She started sending Aisha longer messages—not just highlights, but the texture of her days. The way autumn leaves looked in New Jersey. The taste of apple cider. The anxiety of being called on in class when she wasn't sure of the answer. The small victory of making someone laugh. Aisha reciprocated. She sent photos of monsoon rain on her window, voice messages of street vendors' calls, stories about navigating tenth grade without her best friend by her side. They created new rituals too. Movie nights where they'd start a film at the same time, texting reactions throughout. Book club for two, reading the same books and discussing them. Cooking together over video call, Aisha teaching Priya their mothers' recipes. "What are you making?" Priya asked during one of these sessions, squinting at Aisha's phone screen. "Gulab jamun. Badly. You?" "Mac and cheese. Also badly." They laughed at their respective failures, at the absurdity of trying to cook together from eight thousand miles apart. But in the laughter, in the attempt, they found new ground to stand on. Months passed. Priya made friends—slowly, tentatively, but genuine ones. She told Aisha about them: Keiko from calculus who was as lost as she was, Marcus from English who made her laugh, Sarah from track who pushed her to run faster. Aisha did the same, sharing her expanding world: the dance team she'd joined, the boy she was dating (which required a three-hour call to process properly), the university entrance exams she was stressing about. They were creating separate lives, but they were including each other in those lives. Not as relics of the past, but as active participants in the present. "I'm coming to visit," Aisha announced one day, six months after Priya had left. "Summer break. My parents said yes. I'm coming to America." Priya screamed so loud her mother came running, thinking something was wrong. Everything was right. Aisha was coming. They'd be in the same timezone, the same country, the same room. The months until summer dragged and flew simultaneously. They planned Aisha's visit meticulously: New York City, Priya's school, her favorite spots, the friends she wanted Aisha to meet. When Aisha finally arrived at Newark airport, Priya almost didn't recognize her. Not because she'd changed physically—though she had, her hair shorter, her style different—but because Priya had grown used to seeing her in pixels, in the square frame of a phone screen. They hugged in the arrivals hall, and it felt like coming home and visiting a foreign country simultaneously. Familiar and strange all at once. The visit was perfect and imperfect. They loved the same things they'd always loved, but new differences emerged. Aisha was overwhelmed by the size of everything in America. Priya had forgotten how loud Mumbai was, how Aisha talked with her hands, how she laughed with her whole body. "You're different," Aisha said on their last night together, sitting on Priya's bed. "So are you," Priya replied. "Is that bad?" Priya considered. Six months ago, she would have said yes. Different felt like distance, like loss. But now? "No," she said. "It's just real. We're growing up. We're growing into ourselves. The fact that we're doing it in different places doesn't mean we're growing apart." "I was worried," Aisha admitted. "Worried that you'd make new friends and forget about me. Or that I'd move on and you'd feel betrayed." "I did make new friends," Priya said. "And you should too. That's healthy. That's life. But none of them are you. None of them have eleven years of history with me. None of them know that I'm afraid of escalators or that I cried for three days when our goldfish died or that I still sleep with the stuffed elephant you won me at the fair." Aisha wiped her eyes. "I'm dating Rahul. It's new, it's good, but it doesn't replace you. Nothing replaces you. You're my person." "You're my person too," Priya said. They understood then what they hadn't before: friendship doesn't require sameness of experience. It requires commitment to stay connected despite different experiences. It requires effort, intentionality, the choice to keep choosing each other even when it would be easier not to. When Aisha left, Priya cried. But it was different from the tears she'd cried when she first moved to America. Those had been tears of loss. These were tears of love—love that was strong enough to survive distance, different enough to allow growth, resilient enough to evolve. They continued their calls, their messages, their shared rituals. But they also gave each other permission to have separate lives, to not share every moment, to grow in different directions while staying connected at the root. Years later, at their university graduations—on different continents, in different timezones, in different weather—they video called each other. "We did it," Priya said, in her cap and gown, surrounded by American friends Aisha had heard about but never met. "We did," Aisha agreed, in her saree, surrounded by Mumbai friends Priya only knew through stories. "Same time tomorrow?" Priya asked—their standing question, their ritual, their promise. "Same time tomorrow," Aisha confirmed. And they meant it. No matter the distance, no matter the differences, no matter how their lives diverged—same time tomorrow. Always reaching for each other across the hours, across the miles, across whatever separated them. Because some friendships don't need proximity. They just need priority. And that, they had figured out how to give.