When Friends Move, Part 2

a primal scream about it

Something has once again clicked in the cosmic seasonality of everyone’s life plans and I somehow know 10 people moving away this summer.

A dear friend (who is moving) shared that, when trying to book movers and receiving no guarantee due to demand, the guy said “It’s a huge year for moving.” Maybe you are also sensing this. If you live in one of the places everyone is moving to, I don’t want to hear from you. Just kidding! I do but I will be a little mean the whole time. It is because I am sad.

Almost exactly two years ago I wrote about the 34 stages of non-linear response to friends moving. Each one still feels just as true to me. And while a little therapy and a lot of complaining about it has changed me – my grip has loosened, I feel like less of a personal failure for not, somehow, making things good enough to stay (I now vaguely understand that I don’t control rent or jobs or the dating pool, allegedly) – I still can’t ditch the dread that surfaces every time I look into the eyes of someone I love, or really like, or was hoping to become closer with, and they say “So my lease is up at the end of next month and…”

Dread because I am sad to lose them, but also dread because of the ripple effect moving has on people. On me! I wonder if even more people will leave and if this means I should leave too.

From another angle, though, maybe this is the most primal – and thus sensible in a caveperson wisdom sort of way – response to have. I joked with a friend that this could just be the instinct to run when you see other people running too. The reactive scatter from someone yelling FIRE! in a crowded room but the room is your town.

Put another way: imagine you are at a party, in a big room with a few dozen people all having a blast. Everyone is on tonight. It’s great. Suddenly, three people leave. Five more people follow. There is an immediate loss in the room; that sonorous hum of a lot of people talking at once has dropped out. There’s a spaciousness that feels eerie. More people bail.

Do you really want to be the last person in the room?

That’s what it feels like to me when a wave of people all leave at once. Notice here that I am not even really talking about emotions yet; it is an almost unconscious propulsion to follow, to not be the only or the last, to be in on it.

Distilled to its essence, this note I jotted down years ago:

Beyond the explicit reasons for moving – housing availability, relationships and family, jobs – I can’t help but think that we are just as sensitive to the invisible too. Just as something like the Knicks win jolts an entire city into action (friends in New York describe “the energy all over” “the absolute insanity”), so too can the exodus of people bring everything to a stillness. One feels desirable and the other feels repellent.

Exodus can also be forced; natural disaster, climate change, gentrification, volatile shifts to immigration “hollowing out” towns. How does it feel to live in New Orleans, love New Orleans, and be told “New Orleans is not forever”? I think of all the people clawing to stay where they live, getting heartbroken when they also feel the wind change in their communities. My experience is not half as dire, but it’s part of the same picture. Even in the privileged dimension of feeling like we’re choosing to leave in search of cheaper rent or better jobs, is that ever really a choice?

Place is animated by people. When people leave, our sense of place falters. This is especially true if you don’t live in a Cool Place redeemed by its excess of things to do and places to go. My friends are what make the weekly pond swim so great. They are who I hope to run into on a walk. They suggest the picnic or volunteering together and suddenly where I live has texture and surprise and spirit.

The great and tortuous thing is that, on a long enough – and lucky enough – timeline, this keeps being true.

There are backyards I will never return to and bars I go to less and walking routes I don’t take anymore because the friends who gave me reason to do it have left. But in their place are new living rooms, new walking loops, a new weekly pizza night. If you are fortunate to stay somewhere long enough, you accumulate enough of these moments to form chapters.

I’m able to step back and have sophisticated thoughts like these when I let my panic about friends moving be a prompt and not a mandate. When overcome with the urge to bolt, I try to morph it into a chance to reflect on how I really feel about where I live these days. Who I want to deepen my relationships with, what I want to do more or less of, how I might be changing too. If I still feel a nagging ick and a little heartbreak and a sketch of a sketch of where else I might live someday, fine, but at least it isn’t coming from my monkey brain.

I don’t think there’s a call to action for the movers, who must be left to do their thing for their reasons, as much as there is for those of us who feel left behind. The task is to keep our nerve, try not to get caught in the undertow, and tell ourselves the truth about how we feel. Even if the truth for now is simply that we are sad.

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