You know, it sucks when your best friend moves away. And it sucks when you move away from your best friend. I know. We moved a lot when I was a child.

So I dedicate this post to Kimmy and Allison and Laura and Roger and Susan and Annie and that boy I met in 9th grade when I was lost and alone in a school with 1500 9th graders (coming from an 8th grade with 30 students) and he was the only one who noticed I existed and picked me out of the streaming crowds and teased me about my hat and when he disappeared mid-year, I had to get up my courage to ask his friends where he went and they said he had moved to Ohio and I was crushed – now there was no one left to recognize that I existed if even only to bully me. Lost, lost, lost.

This book captures that feeling perfectly.

“Evelyn Del Rey is moving away.
So she won’t be right here anymore.

Mama says not to be sad,
that we will both make new friends.”

Yeah, nice try, mom, but Evelyn and I have been two peas in a pod, in twin apartments, in twin bedrooms, the same size, speaking the same language – and now we don’t have that anymore. Parents always say that you’ll make new friends, but they forget how hard that can be, and the loss that you feel when someone you’re so close to leaves your world.¹

I love this book, and the way Daniela and Evelyn do the things “just like we always do” and see the people who live down the hall from Evelyn. And I love the illustrations, which make the urban landscape and the apartment buildings where they live look beautiful and exciting, just the way that our childhood haunts do, even if they really weren’t.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post about I Am Running Away Today, about a cat whose best friend has gone, and nothing feels right. The cat fantasizes about finding a new home to fill the hole that their friend’s departure has caused, and finally finds the perfect home. Reminding us that we can’t escape the sad emotions that we feel with physical distance.²

Sometimes, when sad things happen, it helps to read things that help you process those feelings by presenting someone like you going through those feelings. It’s why I read Ramona after bad days at work, and watched Inside Out and Bad Moms on repeat so often from 2020-2022:³ it gives you permission to cry.

But this book has a different moral, as we see on the very last page, where a grown up Daniela reading letters from her “numero uno best friend”, Evelyn.

Make new friends and keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.

1. Mind, if Evelyn hadn’t moved, she and her friend may have some day introduced a third little girl to their friendship – and then, boom! slenderman. Two little girls are sweet and adorable. Three little girls are a recipe for WWIII. ↩︎
2. As my mother said, when, after leaving the company I had worked for since college, I bragged to her about having walked 150 miles around NYC in 3 weeks: “And you’re still not far enough away yet, are you?” ↩︎
3. Don’t ask me why Bad Moms. It’s a dumb, goofy movie and, for some reason, it gets me – right here. ↩︎