My best friend is leaving New York, and this week I helped her pack up her apartment on the Lower East Side, and I have not been okay since.
Her place was a fifth-floor walk-up off Ludlow. Bathtub in the kitchen. Radiator that clanged like a Dhol during Navratri. Tiny, ridiculous, perfect. For three years it was our headquarters. Wine on the fire escape. Crying about boys. Watching Bollywood movies she pretended not to like and then quoting for weeks.
And now it's boxes.
There's a specific grief in packing up someone else's Lower East Side apartment. Because it's not your goodbye, exactly. You're not the one leaving. You're the one staying, folding their sweaters, wrapping their mugs in newspaper, watching a life get flattened into cardboard.
She's moving for a job. A good one. The right decision. I told her so about forty times, and I meant it, and also I wanted to sit in the empty living room and refuse to let her go.
We found things while packing. A ticket stub from a movie at Metrograph. A grocery list in my handwriting. A single earring we'd both been blaming the other for losing since 2024.
The worst part was the last box. When the apartment on the Lower East Side was just walls and light and dust, and we stood in the middle of it, and neither of us said anything, because what do you say.
Here's what I'm learning about friendship in a city like this. People are always leaving. New York is a train station with really good bagels. Everyone is arriving or departing, and if you love people here, you sign up for the departures too.
We got dumplings on Grand Street after. She cried into her soup, which is a hazard. I told her I'd visit. She told me she'd be back for my birthday. We both know how those promises usually go.
But some of them keep.
I walked home over the Delancey side feeling the specific hollowness of a friend-shaped hole in my week.
Goodbyes don't get easier. You just get braver about loving people anyway.
Love,