My best friend is leaving New York, and this week I helped her pack up her Bushwick apartment, and I have not been okay in a normal way since.
We met three years ago at a sample sale in the Garment District, both of us elbow-deep in the same discount rack, both refusing to let go of the same jacket. We split the friendship instead. She got the jacket. I got her.
Her apartment off the Morgan Avenue L was the setting for so much of my New York. The floor where we ate biryani takeout after bad dates. The window we leaned out of during the first real snow. The couch where I cried when my visa stuff got scary and she just sat with me and didn't try to fix it.
And now it's boxes. Packing up a Bushwick apartment is a strange kind of archaeology. We found a receipt from a night neither of us fully remembered. We found the other half of a friendship bracelet I thought I'd lost. She's keeping it. I'm keeping the mate.
She's moving to LA for a job that's genuinely amazing and I'm genuinely happy for her and both of those things being true does not make the boxes hurt less.
Here's what nobody tells you about making a home in a city that isn't the one you were born in: you build a chosen family out of the people who show up. And when one of them leaves, it's not just a friend leaving. It's a piece of your New York packing itself into a moving truck.
I took the L back to Manhattan alone. The car was almost empty. I let myself be sad without narrating it, which for me is a small miracle.
We'll be fine. We'll text at ungodly hours across three time zones. But tonight the city feels one person smaller.
Some people you don't get over. You just make room.
Love,