I went with Kelly this evening to meet Jeff and some others for happy hour drinks. Jeff is moving away from the city in a few short days. Though it is not a final goodbye.  He will be back, he said, for a week at a time every month or so.  We joked we’d probably see him more when he visited that when he was living here. Which is true. His apartment is less than ten minutes from mine and I haven’t seen him in over a year, probably.  It will be different, though.  That’s unavoidable. Leaving and coming back is just not the same as staying.

Like a hoarder enchanted with the idea of parting with an attic full of mildewed Sears catalogs and broken cat toys but unable to fathom how to begin,  I asked how he’d decided to do it? To leave? His answer: it helps to have a hot Puerto Rican boyfriend who invites you to live in his South Florida home rent free. So there’s that.

“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be moving,” he said.  “Or I would move, and it would be to go back to school and I’d end up living with my parents.”

Everyone here has a New York expiration date, be it five days, five years, ten years…death. Everyone reaches at one time or other their breaking point from the exquisite torture of New York life. Jeff had hit that wall where all his time and energy were spent working to pay the rent on his apartment.  An apartment which has, recently, been infested with mice.  He told the gruesome story of having to drown a poor mouse — he couldn’t stand it suffering, stuck to a glue trap — in between bites of his breakfast cereal.

People move all the time, and to be overly sentimental and handwring-y about one friend or other departing is a waste of energy. But there is a particular feeling about leaving the city, at least I imagine, that somehow seems to be equally comprised of victory and defeat.  As Jeff said when I asked, he had thought briefly about going to visit his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, or the place where he worked for several years, a nostalgia tour, but decided no, he was looking forward, not back. Which sounded true, and upbeat.  I’d be lying, though, if I didn’t acknowledge the night was in a way one of those “what about my feelings about your feelings” situations. Kelly had introduced us shortly after I arrived in New York, which was only a few months after they both had, and Jeff was one of the first people I’d met here that I hadn’t known from college, or work.  There was a period in those then years, somewhere in the hazy latter-middle part, where we were part of a group that frequently brunched together, and after pitchers of unlimited mimosas would stumble to the nearest movie theater to see the most ridiculous, popcorn movie that was showing.  It was an easy, merry, adult(ish) relationship.

If this makes it sound like I’m losing my best friend, well I’m not, but he was part of my concentric circle of friends and acquaintances, the kind one has when one has lived in a specific place for a length of time.  I am exceedingly fond of Jeff. I will be excited to see him when he returns. To visit. I wish him the best, I do.

And I wonder about my own expiration date, and when I will hit my threshold of tolerance for New York, and if maybe someone has a house they’d like to invite me to live in, rent-free.