My best friend is leaving New York and I have been very mature about it, by which I mean I cried into a soup dumpling on the Lower East Side.
We went to our place. The dumpling spot off Eldridge, no sign worth mentioning, the one we found three years ago half-drunk after a terrible party in Williamsburg. She's moving to Denver. Cheaper rent, a boyfriend who's actually kind, mountains, a life that doesn't require you to fight for it every single day.
I want to be happy for her. I am happy for her. I'm just also selfishly, childishly devastated, and I think both things get to be true.
When you're building a life in New York far from home, your friends become a kind of family you assemble by hand. She was my emergency contact. She knew my order. She was the one who came over the night I got dumped and let me play sad Arijit Singh songs on repeat without a single complaint, just handing me tissues like a nurse.
Watching her leave New York feels like watching a piece of my chosen family pack itself into boxes.
And there's this other thing underneath it, quieter and uglier. When someone leaves for a softer life, it makes you question your own hard one. If she gets mountains and cheap rent and a kind boyfriend, what exactly am I staying here to prove?
I don't have the answer. I just know that when I walked out of that dumpling place onto the LES, the streets still humming at midnight, someone selling mango slices on the corner, the F train rumbling under my feet, I felt this fierce ridiculous love for this impossible city.
Maybe some of us are stayers. Maybe leaving takes courage and staying takes a different kind. My friend is brave to go. I'm going to try to believe I'm brave to stay.
We hugged for a long time on Delancey. She said, you'll visit. I said obviously.
We both cried. New York didn't notice. It never does.
Some people are chapters, some are the whole spine. She's the spine.
Love,