Love Letter to D.C.

Being back in D.C. feels like seeing an old, good friend again. I’ll always have a soft spot for this city.

I think it’s because, as someone who doesn’t have the traditional sense of “home” and can feel rootless, this is the first place I chose to live in. The first place I got to swell out into the new space of my life and feel my freedom.

I was broke, I had nothing but my independence and my beat-up ’02 Chevy Cavalier, I worked all the time and put most of it in savings, I didn’t always have enough money for my own room. And of course, then, just as now, I was a person living with depression, which meant living was not always easy no matter the external circumstances.

But finally, after so many years of being a body that people did things to, sent to places, kicked out of places, filled up with pills, controlled the insides and outsides of so that I didn’t care what happened to me because there wasn’t even enough “me” there to care about — D.C. was the first place after college where it was just me. No extra weight from anyone else. Just me.

I remember how unbelievably light that felt. How free. The sensation of owning myself and my life, the space to let myself unfold. Only being responsible for my stuff. Finally having the space to feel my stuff.

I think about my relationship with D.C., and it gives me hope about starting again after Philly. That I am not cursed, some fucked-up trauma girl who molds to the shape of whatever bad circumstance she finds.

I felt free here. Even at a time in my life when I understood myself far less than I do now, when I was barely at the very beginning of that relationship. When I didn’t know what was next in my life, just as I’m unsure now. This was a home.

And I can feel that way again.