My friend Sana is leaving New York. She's moving back to Chicago, and I helped her carry her last boxes down four flights of a walkup this week, and I have been quietly not-okay ever since.
We met three years ago at a very bad fashion party where the wine was warm and neither of us knew a soul. She's the reason I survived my first NYC winter. When you have a friend leaving NYC, you don't just lose a person. You lose a witness. Someone who saw the version of you that was figuring it out.
We did a last dinner in the Lower East Side, at the dumpling spot on Eldridge we've been going to since before we could afford it. We ordered too much on purpose. We cried between the soup dumplings and the scallion pancakes, which is a deeply undignified place to cry.
The hard part about a friend leaving NYC is the math of it. This city runs on a brutal accounting system. People arrive so hopeful and burnt out and broke, and then some of them run the numbers and decide it costs too much. Not just the rent. The whole thing. And you can't argue with them because they're usually right.
Sana said, "I love it here but it stopped loving me back." I've thought about that every day since.
We walked to the J train after dinner, the LES doing its warm loud late-August thing, and I hugged her on the platform like a scene from a film. Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, I told her, which made her laugh through her runny nose. Never say goodbye. But we kind of were.
Here's what I'm holding onto. The friends who leave NYC don't erase what they built in you. Sana taught me this city, and now she gets to be somewhere it doesn't hurt.
I'll take the J alone for a while. That's fine. That's the deal.
Who was your first New York friend? Go text them right now.
Love,