My friend Aditi moved to Chicago on Thursday and I have not told anyone how much it has gutted me, so I'm telling you.
We had a table. There's a cafe in DUMBO under the bridge, the one where you can see the Manhattan Bridge frame the buildings just so, and we had a corner table there that was ours in the way things become yours through repetition. Two years of Saturday mornings. Two years of oat lattes and gossip and the occasional cry.
This Saturday I went alone. I don't fully know why I did that to myself. I sat at our table in DUMBO and it was just a table with an extra chair and the extra chair was so loud in its emptiness that I nearly left.
Nobody warns you about friendship grief. We have a whole language for romantic heartbreak, songs, films, entire Bollywood careers built on it. But when a best friend moves away? You're just supposed to be happy for them and text sometimes and act like it's fine.
It's not the same as a breakup. It's quieter and somehow it lasts longer. Aditi was my person here. She was the one who knew my order, my patterns, the exact tone that meant I was pretending to be okay. Making a friend like that as an adult, in a city like this, is genuinely rare. I got very lucky once and now she lives near a different lake.
We called it "our table" and I didn't realize how much of my New York was built around one person until that person got on a flight from LaGuardia.
But here's what I did. I ordered two lattes. I know, I know. I texted her a photo of the empty chair and she FaceTimed me from her new empty apartment and we sat there, DUMBO and Chicago, drinking coffee at the same table across a thousand miles.
The table is still ours. It's just longer now.
Some people move away and stay, somehow, in the chair.
Love,