“You should take my apartment,” Miwako said.

I was standing between her Mount Sinai Hospital bed and the window. A winter sky had darkened the leafless tree branches outside. I turned to my friend of 10 years, her black hair a crew cut, her body shrunken beneath the thin bedsheet. We had bonded over our single, child-free status, shared creativity — she crafted jewelry, I designed my clothes — and our love of Chelsea galleries and hikes near Cold Spring, N.Y. We had caught Mardi Gras beads in New Orleans and cheered on the New York Giants from our seats in the Meadowlands stadium. Miwako was more sister than friend.

“Talk to my landlord,” she whispered, closing her eyes.

My living arrangements had been volatile for two years after I lost my job as a systems manager at a lingerie company and ditched my expensive Midtown studio, stored my possessions and set out to tour a string of Airbnbs, ostensibly to “check out other New York City neighborhoods.”

But instead, I stayed in a series of apartments in Harlem, because Miwako lived nearby and I liked the one-of-a-kind stores like African Paradise and Bebenoir. We listened to jazz at the Shrine, ate at Yuzu, her favorite sushi restaurant, and gathered ginkgo nuts from trees on Lenox Avenue.

I stayed until New Year’s that first year, 2016, and then wintered in Florida with my mother — my free writer’s retreat. Afterward, I faced the dreaded apartment search, but landlords, understandably, requested pay stubs, which I lacked, not savings account balances.