My best friend told me she's leaving New York, and I've been carrying it in my body all week like a stone I swallowed wrong.
We met my first month here, both of us new, both of us pretending we knew where the J train went when we absolutely did not. She was the first person in this city who felt like home instead of homework.
On Sunday we got dosa on the Lower East Side, at the little place we always go, and neither of us said the real thing until the very end.
She's moving for a job. A good one. The kind you don't say no to. And I'm proud of her the exact same complicated way my mother is proud of me — a pride with a lump in its throat.
Nobody prepares you for friendship grief. Romantic heartbreak has a whole genre of songs. But the best friend who leaves? The person who knew which bodega had the good chai, who came over when you cried, who could translate your homesickness because she had her own version of it? That loss doesn't have a soundtrack.
New York does this. The city is a train station pretending to be a home. People come, they blaze bright in your life, and then the current pulls them somewhere else. I knew this. I still hate it.
Over dosa on the LES she reminded me that she's a flight away, that we survived this far apart from our actual families, that a couple thousand miles is nothing now. All true. All correct. Still.
We walked to Delancey after and hugged on the corner for too long, holding up the sidewalk, not caring. She got on the F. I got on the J. The doors closed and the city just kept going, indifferent as always.
I think growing up is learning to love people fully while knowing the city might take them. Loving anyway. Ordering the second dosa anyway.
Hold your people close this week. The current is always moving.
Love,