I thought I would like this place better if transportation wasn't an issue. It's not an issue anymore and I don't enjoy this area more than before.
I want you to close your eyes and imagine a place that's unfriendly, crowded and expensive. Now if what I just described sounds a lot like any large city, then please, add on the insane sameness of 1950s suburbs coupled with identical looking steel and glass apartment buildings all with the same population of young professionals sporting perfectly made up faces and pencil skirts or pantsuits on the weekday and jogging clothes on the weekend. Add the traffic of the city to these suburbs and you have where I'm living.
Some days are better than others. Some days I can crawl out of bed without having been woken up by heavy stomping and loud creaking of my fat upstairs neighbors and take a pleasant stroll to work, enjoying the fresh air and occasional honks from men driving beatup, fifteen year old vehicles. Some days I can enjoy the bike paths that wind their way into DC and the glorious selection of Thai eateries and that I can get a shipment of fresh fruits and vegetables delivered to my door every week.
Other days, my only haven is this block of an office on the 7th floor with one large window spaning from one side to the other, one half of the office painted bright orange, the other a subdued cool gray. These days I don't mind that I can see my stubbly legs through the glass top of the desk (mostly because I mistake them for goosebumps). These days, I take comfort in the infinite supply of hot cocoa and an infinitely more empty mug sitting in front of me.
It's these days that I wonder if this haven of work is worth my unhappiness outside the office. I wonder why I hated Baltimore so much and why I love it now. Is it the familiarity of a place that I've lived before? Would I hate it if I moved back there again? If I moved here, would I still hate it? Is there anyplace besides the slightly rural town close to two major cities that I'll like as much? Is there anyplace I can call home?
To pass the time, sometimes search the online real estate or rentals. I try to imagine what my life would be like if I could afford a 3 mil loft in downtown Arlington, and then I remember that if I made enough money to afford that, I probably wouldn't be living here. Then I like to imagine what my life would be life in a different city. I'd move to Durham, rent a cute 2 bedroom bungalow for as much as I'm paying for rent now, bike downtown to my job at a cool web design firm, pick up scones from the bakery down the street and cringe whenever someone mentions how awesome Duke is. Or maybe I wait for someone to come back and pick me up out of this dense suburban jungle and take me back to live in my grandmothers house where I'll work out of my grandfather's old office and try my luck at acquiring a green thumb.
And then, once I'm gone, a year or so later I'll be lamenting about the lack of bike paths and thai food and being able to walk to work.
This mixed bag of adventures has placed into a man I could have wrapped around my finger just by opening my mouth. There's a certain charm to knowing that if I tried, I could have just about any man that I wanted. And somehow, I hardly ever care. I am almost twenty three years old. Shouldn't I care more about the way my hair falls in the morning, and how many calls have shown up on my missed list? My mother wants me set up, and I feel like she's relating her own experiences of meeting the person she would marry (my father, of course) around the age that I am now.
I remember long ago that she once told me that twenty three was the happiest year of her life. Even if that thought has changed in the years since, at one point in time, she considered my soon to be age her happiest. It's obvious she wishes the same for me, but I'm not interested. My time will be spent blundering over the falls and laughing when I get bruised. (Yes, apparently I'm a masochist).
Even after going on a few dates, closing the door to my room and cutting out all the noise and the heavy current of the city awakens me more than the prospect of a man. I certainly would have a difficult time living in any non-modern era.
I'm slowly sinking in.
And I have a feeling that when I look back on my time spent in this dense urban surburbia, it will mirror how I felt about my time spent in Baltimore. Nostalgia is always better in hindsight.
The trapped feeling I held onto for eight months has slipped away and I'm taking advantage of the freedom of having four wheels instead of two feet with the slight twinge of polluting the environment. (Although, buses running off-peak emit more than cars.) Shirlington is still only a bike ride away, and Del Ray as well, a ride I'd always be happy to take, but now my circle of living space has expanded into DC. The possibilities of having an actual city within reach means that my own experiences can be endless.
It's the end of the summer and those few months adding up to a year are closing in. I will have been here a year at the end of October and I know I'm getting restless. The energy spent acquiring a job, dropping a life, moving two and a half hours away was both tough and exhilarating. Shortly thereafter, the doldrums of life set in, and no matter how much I try to shake my life up, there's only so much I can do without shaking everything out. The unrelenting apathy of adulthood was something I was never expecting. And here it is.
I've been having odd sleeping schedules recently. I can go a few days of midnight to seven-thirty (ok, it's probably eight), one or two in the morning until eight, and then one day when I'll feel some sort of exhaustion and lie down at 7:30. And when I have enough time to dream, I've been dreaming about him. He's always someone different, but with that same spark that I loved so deeply. The only person I've loved, and the only person that has encouraged me to be ever more than I am. There's something odd about the way I last talked to him, how I knew that if I saw him I would know that instant that any affection I had for Will was false, that I was living some life just because it was the thing to do, it was comfortable, I liked him, we got along. But beyond that, there wasn't anything there. We were friends, really good, exclusive friends, but we didn't have that thing that Tim and I had.
Nothing I'm doing now is all that comfortable, besides designing. And I'm caught wondering if I'm dreaming about him because I'm lonely or because there was something there that I left behind.
When I left my parent's house, I was alone and the house was quiet, but at the same time, it wasn't. It was like the place was calling me, closing around me, beckoning me back home. I wondered if it was this way for everyone, if your home suddenly isn't your home anymore, would you ever find a new place to call home? Would there ever be a place where I could feel comfortable again?
It seems that once you step foot outside of the county line, all hope for bikes and pedestrians are lost. Arlington county puts focus on walkable and bike-able areas since it is more of an urban setting and even has two websites: WalkArlington and BikeArlington. All of the converted trails, dedicated bike lanes and sharrows make biking around for errands, transport and fun a lot more convenient. There are still a few areas that could use work, specifically some parts of the Columbia Pike area, which hopefully the county will begin to address as they make improvements to the area. Overall, however, rides around Arlington County are pretty damned easy.
Which is why I hardly ever venture outside the county line on my bike, save for when I bike to work, except to visit Alexandria on the east side of 395. It makes doing errands a bit difficult. Take, for example, a simple drive to Trader Joes, located merely two or three miles away from where I work and live. In theory, the location is more convenient than where I previously lived in Baltimore where the nearest one was fifteen minutes by car, or in Elkton where it was over thirty minutes away. You'd think I'd be there all the time given the proximity, but when considering my mode of transportation, that isn't always the case.
Living at the intersection between two major roads, Rt 7 and Columbia Pike, Trader Joes is difficult to get to on foot or bike. I tend to avoid these types of roads, highways with strip malls up and down the lengths, speed limits topping 50 mph and in some cases, four lanes on each side with no bike paths. In fact, Google maps lists the bike path near Trader Joes on Columbia Pike as being on the sidewalk. As a somewhat experienced biker, I have a rightful apprehension about biking on such busy roads and on the sidewalks.
In addition to these problems, the intersection of these two roads is built as an over/under pass and clover leaf combination, a type of crossing that only really benefits those in cars, but effectively cuts off free foot and bike traffic. The amount of space clover leafs take up is astounding. As a partly urban area, I'd expect these areas to be a loss in possible real estate. And with more and more people giving up their cars and turning to bikes and public transportation, I'm surprised to see blocks like these still existing without and alternatives.
Overall, it's apparent that we still very much live in a car-centric society, even in a metropolitan area. Catering to more and more cars obviously isn't the answer, as building more roads does little to ease congestion. However, we're stuck with it for now. I can just hope that lawmakers will be a bit more open-minded in the future when these sorts of areas come into consideration. More people want to be able to walk around their community. They want to be able to walk to the grocery store, to walk to their favorite spots, to take their kids out with them and to have safe and accessible ways to do this.