Live a little, get around
Reflections after three months living in D.C.
The apartment in D.C. is small and overpriced. They opened the Aldi downstairs right before we moved in and shut down the free streetcar service right after. From what we’ve heard we aren’t going to miss it, though we could use a couple more buses now that it’s gone.
Between the three of us there’s two bedrooms and a little more than 900 square feet of living space. The faux green velvet couch I found at Goodwill with Emmie for 20 bucks made the trip up here and is slowly getting sun bleached in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows in our eat-in-living-room-kitchen. In the winter I can sit on the couch and look out onto the Capitol building. In the spring leaves sprout from the trees and obscure my view.
I read on an ad on the side of an idling Metrobus outside Union Station that there was an active effort to make D.C. the City of Trees. I haven’t heard anyone call it that but if anyone is asking I would say that D.C. is also the City of Orchids and the City of Beautiful Birds. Some mornings I walk to work right before the sun rises and I can’t possibly convey just how loud it gets. It’s less like bird songs and more like bird alarms. Hundreds of them. And there are birds here I’ve never seen before. Even the pigeons are different, they’re huge and almost entirely black except for a tuft of iridescent feathers on the nape of their necks.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize the reason there’s so many birds is because there are no stray cats. The pigeons can catch my eye because there’s abundant food and few natural predators. Or at least that’s what I decided to go with. I can’t think of any other bird predators and any information I have about D.C.’s fauna is based solely on observations made during my sleepy sunless walk to work.
I’ve been here three months now and I’m beginning to recognize people. There’s a security guard that directs traffic through the garage in one of the buildings I pass by and he’s always saying “Happy Monday!” or “Happy Thursday!” or whatever day of the week it happens to be. Only ever that. I don’t think he recognizes me. There are two women who walk their dogs together on the nicer mornings and on one of these I watched as one of the dogs got too excited and snapped at the others.
The guy who works nights at the corner store lets me in early when the doors are still locked. We figured out you can buy anything at the corner store except for beer and stamps. The glass storefront is covered in bright white LEDs so no matter how drunk I am coming home, I always know when to stop the bus.
In our apartment I’m constantly shuffling books around. I brought too many here to begin with and the books that didn’t make it onto our one bookshelf are in overflow stacks on the bedroom floor. Then there’s the books I’ve bought at yard sales and books bought for book clubs I joined in the hopes of making friends. All of these, at least temporarily, end up in stacks on the kitchen island or on the floor next to the couch or scattered on the coffee table. There’s whatever book I’m currently reading and there’s the ones I pulled out for one poem and never put away and there’s the book I’m going to read next left somewhere I don’t remember anymore.
Not to say the books serve no purpose. The one indicator I can trust as to whether or not moving was a good idea is that I have been reading more and therefore writing more. It’s not breakthrough writing. It’s becoming ritualistic. I write about what people are wearing on the train. I write about the kind interactions I have with beautiful men and women in checkout lines, at bus stops. I write poems in my head on my walk to the store and don’t notice that the light at the intersection is green until the cars honk at me.
The world is bigger now and I am part of it. We walk down the street and whisper that this is our city. This is our city now and I am a part of it.