My best friend here is moving to Chicago, and this week we said goodbye on the L train platform at Bedford Avenue, and I have been quietly wrecked about it ever since.
When you move to New York alone, the people who become your family are the ones you build from scratch. Meera was my scratch-built family. We met in a fitting room at a sample sale two years ago, both reaching for the same ridiculous sequined jacket, and that was that.
The friend who moved away was the one I texted at 2AM. The one who knew how I take my chai. The one who let me cry in her Williamsburg apartment when the homesickness got too big, and never once made me feel dramatic about it.
And now she's gone. Job, apartment, whole life, packed into a truck heading west.
We did one last night in the city the way we always did. Bhel from the Indian spot, walking the L train corridor, laughing too loud on the Williamsburg waterfront while the skyline showed off across the water. Then the goodbye at Bedford, which I'd been dreading all night.
Nobody warns you that the friend who moved away leaves a specific-shaped hole. Not a boyfriend hole, not a family hole. A weekday hole. A who-do-I-tell-this-to hole.
We hugged until a train came and went. Then we hugged until another one came. Finally she got on and I stood there waving like the ending of every Shah Rukh Khan movie I've ever sob-watched, dupatta practically fluttering, except it was just me and a MetroCard and a lot of feelings.
The thing about this city is that it's built on transience. People arrive, people leave, the L train keeps running regardless.
But the friend who moved away isn't really gone. Chicago's a phone call away. We'll figure out the long-distance version of us, the way we figured out everything else.
Still. I already miss her.
Hold your people close while they're on your subway line.
Love,