ALMOST CARRIE ~ Bucks County

In the final episode of season 4, Mr. Big moves to a vineyard in Northern California, prompting one of the best exchanges in the series: “I’m tired of old New York,” Big says. “Well, if you’re tired you take a nappa, you don’t move to Napa,” Carrie replies.

I learned this evening that my good friend is “leaving New York,” a rubber stamp of a phrase for those who move on, the suggestion being that New York isn’t merely a place, but a lover. Without a swift and decisive break, you might lose your nerve, crumble under the memory of the way it held you for the past however many years (in my friend’s case, ten).

In Sex and the City, Carrie begs Big to stay. “You’re the Chrysler Building,” she says. “The Chrysler Building would be all wrong in the vineyard.” My friend is not the Chrysler Building. My friend is a cottage, clapboard I think, with window boxes of tulips facing the sun. She was never meant to stay in the city, she’s known that for years, but there was never any immediate need for me to worry—jobs and money and boyfriends and the simple chugging along of life keeping her nearby. But bit by bit, her path veered, an incremental shift that led to the voicemail she left tonight with the news that she was packing up her young family and taking it to Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

The momentum was building all along, of course. There was her wedding in a beautiful old carriage house on Downing Street in the West Village, for which I made the cake, platforms and dowels and industrial-size mixing bowls crowding my Chelsea walk-up for weeks. She and her fiancé, now husband, would stop by for tastings and consultations—more lemon here, and cream cheese versus buttercream frosting.  Then there was the new job, the one that had nothing to do with our shared college major (theatre), a job with health insurance and vacations and the ability to work, she always added, not simply from home but from wherever home might be.  And last but not least, a baby, the finishing touch, a son she labored with for 44 excruciating hours, who is so lovely it’s hypnotic. Now, everything’s in place the way she wanted it except for the place itself.

So unlike Carrie, I knew this day was coming, but the knowledge didn’t—doesn’t—prevent my sense of loss. Despite the fact that I don’t see my friend as much as I used to, despite the fact that we are both quite different now than we were when we met (the very first hour of college, both of us bewildered in our own ways as we watched our families quit us cold turkey), she has still been there, just a mile away, and that is something I must unknowingly count on. Because tonight, after hearing her voicemail, her very good news about Bucks County, I am left feeling achey and lost, and I so don’t want her to go.

Laura & Emily, New York City, 2008

Emily Sproch is a writer and a Sex and the City tour guide. Each Friday, she chronicles the fine line between reality and fiction in her column “Almost Carrie.”