My best friend Tanya moved to Chicago last week, and now I can't look at the L train without feeling something complicated.
For two years, the L train meant her. Bedford Avenue, her apartment four flights up with the crooked window, the bodega cat on the corner she named Rajinikanth for no reason except it felt right.
When a friend moves away, nobody sends a casserole. There's no ritual for it. You just wake up one day and the L train to Williamsburg goes to a place where your person no longer is.
We met at a sample sale in 2024, both reaching for the same ugly-beautiful chartreuse coat. She let me have it. That's how you know someone's good.
Tanya understood the specific loneliness of being far from home. She was from Pune, I'm from Ahmedabad, and we'd cook khichdi in her tiny kitchen on Sundays when the city felt too big and too cold and too American. We'd watch old Hindi films and argue about which hero aged the best.
The night before she left, we sat on her bare floor surrounded by boxes and ate from one plate, the way we always did. She said, "You'll be okay." I said, "Obviously." We both cried anyway.
When a friend moves away, you grieve a version of the city, not just a person. My Williamsburg is gone now. The rooftop where we watched fireworks. The dumpling spot on Grand. The L train that I'll keep accidentally thinking about taking to see her.
I rode it once this week, all the way to Bedford, like an idiot. Stood outside her old building. Rajinikanth the cat was there, unbothered, immortal.
We text every day. It's not the same. But she sent me a photo of Lake Michigan and said it reminds her of nothing in India, and I laughed, because that's so her.
Distance is just love that has to work harder now.
Text the friend you miss. Don't wait for them to move first.
Love,