My best friend moved back to India this week and I am not okay, in the ordinary way you're not okay when something ends that had no reason to.
Meera and I met at a rooftop thing in Bushwick three years ago, both of us clutching drinks we didn't like, both of us Gujarati, both of us pretending we knew what "networking" meant. We didn't. We knew each other instead.
She got a job in Bangalore. A good one. The kind you don't say no to. And this week I rode with her to JFK on the AirTrain from Jamaica, both of us quiet, her suitcases taking up the whole car.
At the terminal she did the thing where she hugged me and then immediately made a joke so neither of us would fully cry. "Now who will tell you your outfit is too much," she said. My outfit was, in fact, too much. I'd worn my best coat to say goodbye to my best friend. It felt correct.
Here's the cruel math of it. When my best friend moved back to India, she didn't just leave. She took a nine-and-a-half-hour time difference with her. Her morning is my night. Her Sunday is halfway into my Saturday. We now live in different days.
I walked out of JFK into that specific Queens light and got on the train and the city looked exactly the same, which felt like an insult. How does a place stay identical while you lose a whole person inside it?
But here's what I keep telling myself. Ahmedabad has her now, and Ahmedabad is my home too, so in some strange way she's gone toward me, not away. She's closer to my mum's kitchen than I am. She promised to go eat the fafda I can't get here and send me photos to torture me. That's love. Cruel, delicious love.
New York gives you people and then, sometimes, it gives them back to the world. That's the deal. Nobody signs it but you agree to it anyway.
I already miss her too-honest opinions on my too-much coats.
Some friendships just change their address, not their weight.
Love,