Sana is moving back to Chicago and I found out over eggs in Williamsburg.
We were at that place off Bedford with the good shakshuka and the wait that's never worth it but you do it anyway. She said it casually, between sips of coffee, like she was telling me she'd switched toothpaste.
The lease is up. The job is remote now. Her mom isn't well. New York is expensive. All the reasons, lined up neat like they could make it hurt less.
Saying goodbye to a friend leaving the city is a specific kind of ache I didn't have a word for until this morning.
It's not like a breakup. There's no villain. There's just the slow understanding that the version of your life that had this person in it — the 2am L train rides, the shared umbrella, the knowing someone would pick up — is ending while you sit there with hollandaise.
I wanted to be happy for her. I am happy for her. New York wore her down the way it does — the smallness of the apartments, the bigness of the loneliness, the math that never works.
But I also wanted to grab her hand and say please don't make me do this city without you.
We walked to the waterfront after. The Manhattan skyline across the river looking impossibly pretty, pretending it hadn't just taken something from me.
Sana said, you'll be fine, you love it here in a way I never did. And she's right. The goodbye brunch wasn't about convincing her to stay. It was about letting her go gently.
There's a line from Dil Chahta Hai I kept thinking about, about how friendship doesn't need words. We didn't need many.
She hugged me at the Bedford Avenue stop and got on the L and that was that.
The city feels one person emptier tonight.
To everyone who's watched a friend leave this city — I know. I'm sorry. Me too.
Love,