Anjali left on Thursday. Packed up her Harlem apartment, the one with the crooked floors and the radiator that clanged like a temple bell, and moved to Chicago for a job she'd be a fool to turn down.
I helped her carry the last boxes down four flights on 145th. We were not graceful about it. We dropped a lamp. We laughed so we wouldn't do the other thing.
New York gives you these friendships and then takes them back, and nobody warns you. You meet someone in your first scary year here, two homesick girls clinging to each other over dosa in Curry Hill, and you build a whole little life together. And then the city, which brought you together, shrugs and lets one of you go.
When the U-Haul pulled away on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, I waved like an idiot until it turned the corner. Then I walked to the 1 train and cried somewhere between 137th and 116th, quietly, the way you cry in public in this city, which is to say you let it leak and you stare at the ads for dermatologists and you let nobody know.
Anjali was the one who taught me how to be here. How to swipe through a turnstile without breaking stride. Which bodega cat to trust. How to say no to people without apologizing into the next century. She was my home that I could call from the 1 train.
I know we'll text. I know there's FaceTime, there's flights, there's a whole stubborn modern toolkit for staying close. But it isn't the same as her being two trains away. The friendships New York gives you are physical, built on shared subway rides and bad weather and being twenty-something and terrified together.
I got off at 110th and the sun was setting over the Hudson and I thought, okay. This is the cost of loving people in a city that's always in motion.
Love them anyway. The leaving is proof the loving was real.
Love,