I'm glad to go, I cannot tell a lie

I'm getting ready to leave DC, my home for the past seven years. It still hasn't quite sunk in- that I'm saying goodbye to clumsily galloping to catch trains covered with ads for jets and buses covered with ads for abortion counseling; to throngs of overachieving high school students and Girl Scouts and gastrointerologists descending on the city every summer; to chance meetings with former teachers, friends' parents, and neighbors who sit outside to smoke and call me "doll"; to being kept awake by the sound of young women on the sidewalk below yelling "Get out of my FACE!" to each other; to frequent conversations in which you mask your insecurity or dissatisfaction with your job by bemoaning with studied weariness that you are sooooo busy and you are soooo annoyed with (insert government agency here). In a way it seems like I've only lived here for three years-the part of the city where I went to college, which is now just the closet Metro stop to the Trader Joe's, seemed at the time like the boundaries of the civilized world; and it shocks me to think how little of the city I'd actually seen before I graduated. Sometimes I feel like I'm leaving just as everyone else is getting here, sometimes it seems like I'm just beating the rush. Either way, I think I'm leaving on a high note.