Aanya left New York yesterday and I rode the 1 train home alone and I'm still not okay about it.
We said goodbye at Penn Station, which is a cruel place to feel any emotion because it's lit like a hospital and smells like a pretzel that gave up. She was dragging two suitcases that weighed more than both of us. She's moving to Chicago. A real job, a real apartment, a boyfriend who's actually nice. All the right reasons. I told her all the right things.
And then she went through the gate and I stood there like an idiot watching the spot where she'd been.
Aanya was my first real friend here. We met at a sample sale on the floor, both reaching for the same horribly overpriced coat, and she let me have it, and that was that. Four years. She knew which bodega had the good chai. She'd come over and we'd watch old Shah Rukh films and ugly-cry at the parts we'd seen forty times.
The thing nobody warns you about New York is that it empties out around you. People come here on fire, and then the city wears some of them down, or it doesn't and they just outgrow it, and either way they leave. And you stay. And every goodbye carves a little address into you — this corner was hers, that bar was ours.
I took the 1 train back uptown alone. The 1 train is the one we always took together, arguing about everything from 14th Street to 116th. Last night it was just me and the screech of the local stops and a seat next to me that felt very, very empty.
I thought I'd cry on the 1 train. I didn't. I just sat with it. The missing. Sometimes that's the only thing you can do with love — sit next to the empty seat and not pretend it isn't there.
She texted me when she landed. A photo of the Chicago skyline and just: "It's nice but it's not the 1 train." And I laughed in my apartment, alone, finally crying a little, both things at once again.
The city will give me new friends. It always does. But it won't give me her, and I'm learning that's allowed to ache.
Love the people who leave. Ride the train home anyway.
Love,