My best friend Simran moved out of New York this week, and I rode the L train alone on Friday and felt every empty inch of the seat next to me.
We met two years ago at a mutual friend's terrible Diwali party in Bushwick, both of us hiding by the food, both of us Gujarati, both of us pretending we knew the DJ. We were inseparable within a month.
She lived in Williamsburg and I would take the L train from my side to hers so often that the ride became muscle memory. Bedford Ave, that walk to her apartment, the bodega cat we named Shah Rukh. Our whole friendship had a route.
And now she is in Austin, for a job, for a boy, for reasons that are good and correct and that I am genuinely happy about while also being quietly devastated.
Nobody warns you about this specific NYC grief. People leave. The city is a train station pretending to be a home. You build a whole life around someone and then they get a job offer in a place with parking.
I helped her pack last weekend, both of us crying while wrapping her mugs in newspaper, playing sad Arijit Singh songs like we were in a movie about ourselves. She gave me her good frying pan. I will think of her every time I make aloo.
Riding the L train alone felt wrong. I kept almost texting her a photo of the ad we always laughed at. My thumb knew the way even when my heart didn't.
Here is what I am learning about friends leaving NYC. The friendship does not end. It just changes shape, gets stretched across time zones, lives in voice notes at 2AM her time.
But the day-to-day version of her, the one I could reach in twenty minutes on the L train, that one is gone, and I am allowed to mourn her even though she is alive and thriving and sending me photos of breakfast tacos.
Williamsburg will feel different now. Every neighborhood is a little bit made of the people you knew there.
I rode the L train back to my side alone, and I let myself be sad the whole way.
Distance is just love with a longer commute.
Love,