My best friend moved to LA on Tuesday and I've been walking around like someone unplugged something in my chest.
Her name is Ananya. We met three years ago at a mutual friend's Diwali party in Bushwick where we both realized we were the only two people who actually knew the words to the songs. Instant. Done. The kind of friendship that skips the small talk and goes straight to "come over, I'm making dal, bring your heartbreak."
She lived off the Jefferson stop. I'd take the L over the river to hers constantly. The L train was our whole geography. We knew its moods, its weekend betrayals, the exact bench we always ended up on. Half my New York memories have that train rumbling underneath them.
And now she's on the other coast. A job she couldn't say no to, a life that made sense to say yes to. I told her to go. I meant it. I also cried in the bathroom at her going-away thing at a bar on Wyckoff, which I'm choosing to blame on the tequila.
Here's what nobody warns you about adult friendship. Losing your person to another city isn't a breakup, so nobody sends you flowers, nobody checks in. But it's a grief. A real one. You lose the casual. The "you up? come over." The ambient knowledge that your person is a forty-minute L train ride away and always will be.
We've already scheduled a call. We've already planned my flight out in November. We're doing the whole long-distance-friendship starter pack. And I know — I know — that a friendship this real doesn't die from geography. My friendships back in Ahmedabad survived me moving to New York. Distance is annoying, not fatal.
But Tuesday the L train pulled into the Jefferson stop and I felt it in my whole body. There's nobody at the top of those stairs anymore. Not for me.
I'll get used to it. That's the sad, ordinary truth. You always get used to it. And then one November you land at LAX and she's at arrivals doing something embarrassing to get your attention and it's like no distance ever happened.
The city gives you people and then scatters them.
Call your long-distance person tonight. I'm about to call mine.
Love,