Nobody tells you that some friendships don't end in a fight. They end in DUMBO, over two flat whites, both of you checking your phones a beat too often.
I met R for coffee on Saturday near the Manhattan Bridge, in that cobblestone stretch of DUMBO where every tourist takes the same photo of the bridge framing the Empire State Building. We used to laugh at those tourists together. We used to laugh at everything together.
We were inseparable my first year in New York. She knew the version of me that cried on the L train and didn't know how to read a MetroCard machine. She knew me before I knew me here.
But Saturday in DUMBO, we ran out of things to say by the bottom of the cup.
It wasn't anyone's fault. I'd changed. She'd changed. We were two people describing the same old jokes to each other like reciting a language neither of us spoke fluently anymore.
There's a scene in every Bollywood film where the friends embrace at the airport, music swelling, promising forever. Real life doesn't give you that song. Real life gives you a slightly-too-long pause on a DUMBO street corner and a "we should do this more often" that you both know is a kindness, not a plan.
We hugged under the bridge. The F train rattled across overhead, drowning out whatever we said, which felt right.
Walking to the York Street station after, I let myself feel it properly. Saying goodbye in DUMBO to a friendship that carried me through my hardest year is not a tragedy. It's a graduation. She got me here. She doesn't have to walk the rest of it.
I'm learning that you can love someone and still let the friendship rest. That outgrowing isn't betrayal. That DUMBO can be beautiful and a little sad in the exact same frame, like that photo everyone takes.
I didn't cry on the train. Progress.
Some people are chapters, not the whole book. And that's allowed.
Love,