I went to a goodbye party for a friend who's leaving New York City

Never Done: I went to a goodbye party for a friend who's leaving New York City

I'm the one who's supposed to leave. I'm the one who's not from here. I'm the one who's supposed to make the hard decision and have a yard sale and pack up all the rest and hit the road. When I had to get a criminal clearance in order to adopt, I had to fill in a form with 28 years of past addresses. Guess how many times I moved in 28 years? 28. But from birth to age 18, I lived in one place. The house my parents bought in 1961, when my sister was a year old, two years before I was born.

Since then I've lived in France, Maine, Sri Lanka, England, California, Oregon, New Jersey and New York -- with lots of stops back in Massachusetts and lots of smaller moves from neighborhood to neighborhood, house to house, and apartment to apartment. When I moved to NYC 9 years ago, I did not think I was making a permanent move. I thought I was coming for grad school and then hightailing it back to Portland. But that's not what happened. As much as I complain about it here (the stenches, the expenses, the crowds, the limitations of housing) I still find enough reasons to stay, and those reasons mostly have names and faces and big hearts and creative minds and amazing senses of humor and big smarts and all together they form my community, and my NY family of choice. (I still love and miss my communities and families in New England and Portland and elsewhere, and when I threaten to leave New York, I'm running to something at least as much as I'm running from.)

And now one of my New York people -- one of them I feel closest to -- is leaving. She too has been complaining about NYC for as long as she's been here, and she's finally making the break. At her goodbye party she said it's really hard to leave New York, even if you complain about it all the time. But she screwed up her courage, and she's doing it. I want to be happy for her, and I actually am, but my happiness is in a great deal of conflict with my awareness of the gaping hole she's going to leave behind.

So this is what it's like to be on the other side. I mean, I understood that this is what it's like, but this is what it feels like. There's nothing like a move away from close people to focus on the Mussar practice of balancing the burden of the self vs the burden of the other. It could be so easy to remind my friend, and remind her again, how much I'm going to miss her -- and I think some of that is good, because it lets her know how much I love spending time with her. But I know from personal experience that it also can feel awful -- like the choice to leave is intentionally geared to hurt those you're leaving, or like the pain is so great that the friendship will forever be tinged (or doused) with the guilt of it. So every time I've felt like telling her how much I'm going to miss her, I've instead asked myself, "What is her burden?" And when I think I have a good sense of what it might be, I try to tell her something that balances what I think is best for both of us.

Also, I'm totally taking the cute summer hat she's giving away. I shouldn't get nothing out of this.