Nobody warns you that the hardest part of New York isn't the rent or the rats. It's watching people leave.
My friend is leaving New York. For real this time — not a "need a break" leaving but a one-way-flight, gave-up-the-lease, mailing-her-plants-to-her-mother kind of leaving. She's moving back West, closer to her family, and she's right to. I told her she's right to. I meant it. I also wanted to lie down in the F train tracks about it.
We said our goodbye on a rooftop in DUMBO, the cliché one, where the Manhattan Bridge frames the whole sky and everyone's taking the same photo. We did not take the photo. We just looked.
She was my first New York friend. The one who taught me which deli does the real bacon-egg-and-cheese and which subway car not to get into. When you're far from home, watching a friend leave New York feels like losing a second family on top of the first one you already left in Ahmedabad.
We didn't get dramatic. We split a beer and got quiet and watched a train cross the bridge, and she said, "You'll be okay. You're more this-city than you think." Which is a generous thing to say to someone who still gets lost in the West Village.
There's a line in every Bollywood farewell where somebody runs after the train. I didn't run. I just hugged her too long on the corner of Washington and Water, and then she got in the Uber, and then she was a taillight, and then she was nothing.
The bridge was still there. The city absorbs you and absorbs your goodbyes and keeps going.
I walked to the York Street F alone. Different than I'd come.
Love the ones who leave anyway. The leaving doesn't make the love a waste.
Love,