(Not Ready to Say) Goodbye, Washington

It hasn’t really hit me yet that I’m leaving Washington in two days. Washington, my home for the past two years. My communities. My family and friends. My job(s). My life.

Needless to say, the goodbyes have been plentiful and filled with drunken promises to download WhatsApp immediately (and if you haven’t yet, get on it).

My final week has been scheduled to the brim with celebrations and lots of fancy dinners with all of my fancy friends. It has been bittersweet, yet perfect.

I didn’t have a plan and barely had any local friends when I moved up here. But Washington has been so kind to me, and I was so lucky my aunt and uncle forfeited their guest room for probably longer than they were expecting. I was lucky to find a job after just a couple months and even more lucky to build infiltrate communities at Biker Barre and St. Marks, while meeting new friends and catching up with old ones. My Washingtonian bubble is one of the best I could have ever asked for, truly.

There is so much I could say, so much I want to say, about how much these years in Washington have shaped me and opened my world to different views on life and adulthood. But in an attempt not to ramble for days (because I only have two left and haven’t finished packing), I’ll leave you with this quote Lauren gave me last night in lieu of tears:

In a sense, it’s the coming back, the return which gives meaning to the going forth. We really don’t know where we’ve been until we’ve come back to where we were. Only, where we were may not be as it was because of who we’ve become. Which is, after all, why we left.

I don’t know if I’ll return to DC when I come back from France. But for now I’m ok with the uncertainty, because I know I’ll always be able to call it home. ♦