My best friend in New York moved back home this week, and I keep reaching for my phone to tell her things she's no longer close enough to run over and hear.
Her name is Reshma and we met at a rooftop party in Bushwick three years ago, both of us clutching drinks we didn't want, both of us the only brown girls in the room doing the silent radar thing. Within an hour we were plotting our escape to a dosa spot in Curry Hill.
She got a job in Chicago. Better pay, closer to her parents, a real apartment with a real dishwasher. All the correct reasons. I told her I was thrilled for her and I meant it and I also wanted to lie down on the L train tracks a little.
We said goodbye on the Bedford Avenue platform. Of course we did. Everything with us happened on the L train — the drunk rides home, the hungover rides to brunch, the ride the night she got dumped when she cried into my shoulder past three stops.
The thing about being the one who stays is that the city stays the same and you just have to keep walking through all the places that used to have her in them. The dosa spot. That bench in McCarren Park. The corner where she once ate a whole falafel while sobbing about a man not worth one bite.
When the L train came she hugged me too hard and got on and I watched the doors close on her face and I did not cry until Lorimer.
Here is what nobody warns you about adult friendship. Nobody breaks up. People just get on trains going somewhere better for them, and you love them enough to want that, and it guts you anyway.
We'll text. We'll visit. She already sent a photo of her Chicago dishwasher like a war trophy.
But the L train goodbye is a specific grief. The city gives you people and then, sometimes, quietly takes them back.
I'm learning to stay, and to let go, on the same platform.
Tell your people you love them before the doors close.
Love,