My best friend Riya flew home to Bombay on Friday. Permanently. And I cried at JFK like someone in a movie I would normally make fun of.
We met three years ago at a sample sale in the Garment District, both of us elbow-deep in a discount bin, both of us reaching for the same defective Ganni dress. We split it. Long story. The point is, she became my person in this city.
Riya was the one I called when the breakup happened on Wednesday. She came over with wine and lasted exactly eleven minutes before falling asleep on my couch, jet-lagged from her own packing. I let her sleep. That's friendship too.
So Friday I rode the E train and the AirTrain out to JFK to see her off. Terminal 4. We stood near the security line not saying the real things, talking instead about her layover, about whether she packed her chargers, about nothing, because the something was too big.
Then they called her zone and I cried at JFK. Properly. The ugly kind. She cried too. We held onto each other while a family with seven suitcases tried to get around us, and I thought, this is the cost of an immigrant life nobody itemizes. You make a home far away and then it keeps leaving in pieces.
She's going back for good reasons. Her parents are older. Bombay is calling. I'd never ask her to stay. But knowing someone left for the right reasons doesn't make the AirTrain home any less empty.
I rode back alone, watching the planes lift off, wondering which one was hers. The E train into Manhattan felt longer than it's ever felt. I cried at JFK and then I just leaked quietly the whole way home, which is a more sustainable model.
Here's what nobody tells you about being the one who stays. You absorb every goodbye. You become the keeper of the version of New York you two built together, the sample sales, the 2AM dosa runs, the inside jokes that now have nowhere to land.
I keep her defective half of that Ganni dress, by the way. We never un-split it.
Goodbye doesn't get easier. You just get more practiced at surviving it.
Love,