Day 11: Ariel

Almost every morning, without fail, I text with Ariel on WhatsApp as I get ready for my day. She lives 7 hours ahead in Tel Aviv, and has since fall 2019. We lived together for one singular, amazing year in an apartment in Washington Heights, which helped us add to the list of descriptors we give ourselves: best friends, sisters, roomies, wives.

Ariel and I met as middle schoolers and became friends when I joined her travel soccer team, but our story starts way before that. Our mothers worked together at Avon for a few years before they had us, before Ariel’s very Irish Catholic mom met her very Israeli dad. Years later, they bumped into each other — pregnant! — on the bus. Ariel and I were born 5 days apart. But they wouldn’t see each other again until those soccer tryouts. When her mom and my mom recognized each other, the rest was history. We carpooled with them every Saturday and Sunday to practice and games, belting out Jon Bon Jovi and Celine Dion songs the whole way.

We went to different high schools and colleges, and then Ariel went to RISD for her masters in architecture while I lived and worked in Madrid. When we both moved back to New York, we were living with our parents.

On Halloween 2016, while we pregamed before going to my sister’s friend’s rooftop party, Ariel dressed as a cow and me dressed as a farmer, we realized that we could be the solution to our living-at-home-again woes: we’d move in together. We listed all the reasons why living with each other might not work, might ruin our friendship. Then we listed all the weird OCD things that we both agreed must happen in an apartment. When we were listing which chores we preferred and which we didn’t, we were already in it. We’d decided. We’d be roommates.

Fast forward to this morning. I’m juggling the phone as I go between the bathroom and the kitchen, pull on my socks. She checks hers and replies in stolen moments at work. We text about nothing and everything: annoying things coworkers said, the perfect ringlet that formed in our hair, my doctor’s appointment on Tuesday, travel plans we both have, her ultrasound appointment today. Our conversations always happen in real-time during my mornings before work, and then it’s a bit of phone tag after 4 PM EST when she’s already asleep or heading there.

But I know, no matter what, that if I send a text when she’s already sleeping, by the time I wake the next morning, the reply will be there, the conversation ready to be picked up where we left off.