My closest friend in this city is moving to LA in three weeks, and I have been handling it with all the grace of a dropped chai cup.
We met when I first moved here, both of us lost, both of us pretending we weren't. She's the one who taught me which subway car to stand in. The one who sat with me through my first heartbreak in this country. The one who knows the homesick face I make before I know I'm making it.
So on Sunday evening we walked the Brooklyn Bridge.
We started on the Manhattan side, near City Hall, and walked toward DUMBO as the light went gold and ridiculous and impossibly cinematic, like a Bollywood song was about to start and we were the leads.
The friend who leaves. That's a category I'm learning exists in adulthood. Nobody warns you that the people who build your city with you sometimes pack up and take a piece of the skyline with them.
We didn't say much on the bridge. The wind was loud and the tourists were everywhere and honestly there wasn't much to say that we both didn't already know.
At one point she grabbed my arm and said "don't make it weird," which is exactly the kind of thing the friend who leaves says right before both of you make it extremely weird.
We cried a little. Standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, in front of strangers, watching Manhattan light up behind us. Two brown girls who found family in each other six thousand miles from where we started.
She said distance is just logistics. I want to believe her. I told her I'd visit LA and complain about the lack of walkable streets the entire time, and she laughed in that way that already felt like a memory.
Love doesn't end at a zip code. I know that. Mira and I have video-called through three years and two time zones already. But the friend who leaves still leaves a doorway-shaped hole.
We got dosas in DUMBO afterward and pretended everything was normal.
Some friendships outlive the cities that made them. I'm choosing to believe ours is one.
Love,