My best friend moved away from the Lower East Side last week, and I've been walking around with a strange hole in my week ever since.
Her name is Nisha. We met four years ago in a fitting room disaster at work, bonded over both being the only brown girls in the room, and somehow built a whole life out of it. She lived off Delancey, one stop from me on the J, close enough that we treated each other's apartments like extensions of our own.
When your best friend moves away from the Lower East Side, you don't just lose a person. You lose a whole map. The dumpling place on Eldridge we went to every Sunday. The bar on Orchard where the bartender knew our order. The specific corner where we'd stand arguing about which train to take.
She got a job in Chicago. A good one. The kind you don't say no to. I told her to take it, and I meant it, and it also broke something small in me to say.
Our last dinner was at the Eldridge place, of course. We ordered too much, the way we always did. She cried into her soup dumplings. I told her that was unsanitary, then cried too.
There's a line in Dil Chahta Hai about how friendships change but don't end. I've held onto that this week like a railing.
I helped her pack the last box. Her apartment looked so wrong empty — I'd only ever known it full of her clothes and candles and half-finished tea. We sat on the bare floor and didn't say much.
At the airport she hugged me too long and said, "You'll visit." I will. But it won't be the same as the J train being all that stood between us.
The city feels bigger and lonelier this week. The LES feels haunted with her.
Some people become a neighborhood, and then they leave, and you have to learn the streets again.
Love,