Sunday Essay: On D.C., Long Distance, and Saying Goodbye

The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, January 10^th. It is the 26^th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.

Last week’s essay: On New Year’s Day, Hobbes, and the Big White Sheet of Paper

There was a bookstore in D.C., on the northernmore Connecticut Avenue spoke of Dupont Circle, called Kramerbooks. It’s still there, it appears. I googled it just now, and it’s changed its name, and its owner’s discussing moving it to another place in the city when its lease is up, but it’s still there. A bookstore and a little café, wedged inside a wedge of a city block, sliced diagonally by Connecticut between 19^th and 20^th.

We used to go there. Not every time I visited Emma, but often. To browse. To find something specific. To grab a drink and dessert and talk for an hour or two. We loved it there.

They say being a grandparent is great because you get to do all of the fun stuff and none of the hard stuff. I think there’s a parallel there with your partner’s city in a long-distance relationship. For two years (two and a half, if we count that semester and summer in college), I got to do all the fun stuff with D.C. Then, on Sunday afternoon, I’d fly home, never there long enough to be grated by the place.

Emma lived in Adams-Morgan, in the quieter half, a few blocks off 18^th. She was a Senate staffer at the time, and my “job” (which paid like a job, and gradually didn’t require the work of a job) was lenient when it came to remote work. So, over those two years, my visits gradually expanded, beginning with a late-night Friday flight and the Sunday afternoon return trip, then expanding to arriving Thursday on the second-to-last plane, which took off around six, and finally to arriving Wednesday most of the time, though once—for her birthday—I made it a whole week.

Because we were doing long-distance, every visit was an occasion, and we treated it as such. We went to Mount Vernon, and to the Arlington Cemetery, and we walked Theodore Roosevelt Island and we kayaked the Potomac from Georgetown. We saw the national Christmas Tree at the White House. We went to Nationals games. We went out on 18^th, and on…U Street? And we brunched on 14^th that one time? (I don’t remember the specifics, tourist that I was.) She gave me the official Capitol tour, and we walked around the monuments so often it was commonplace, and we went on runs down by Rock Creek and ate Afghan food at Lapis and one night after a big, fluffy snow we sat in her apartment eating sushi and watched Olympic figure skating with her former-figure-skater roommate, and that too was an occasion, and that too was a piece of D.C. And during the workdays, I walked.

I felt comfortable being “offline” (visibly unavailable to my bosses) for twenty or thirty minutes at a pop, and Emma’s roommate worked from home on Fridays and liked having the apartment to herself, so often on those mornings I’d wake up, have a bowl of cereal (because she only ever had that gross, healthy kind of peanut butter you have to stir before you spread), shower, and set out for somewhere. Most of the times I did this, I began at the Starbucks on Dupont, then gradually worked my way, coffee shop to coffee shop, Starbucks to Panera to Starbucks to Starbucks, down Massachusetts and Pennsylvania until I could meet her at happy hour or coming out of Hart at the end of the day. One time, I took the blue or orange line over to Rosslyn, then worked my way back to Adams Morgan from there, through Georgetown. There is a view from the Key Bridge, looking west at the university’s rising spires and the narrow-but-thick line of forest hugging the river in timelessness, that I don’t have the words for. Not because it was awe-inspiring or even all that unusually beautiful. There was just something there. I saw it on a sunny day in August.

There were other moments where there was just something there. The cup of tea and breakfast sandwich on a grey fall morning in Farragut Square. Bits of ice on the waterfront by the Jefferson Memorial. Children playing in Kalorama Park, where I feel like the playground had a big sign about its sustainable water drainage? There were, of course, the “local favorites,” hidden gems unhidden but still treated as secrets: Jazz in the Sculpture Garden. The portrait gallery. Someone inevitably commenting, “That’s where Reagan got shot,” when we passed the Hilton on Connecticut and Columbia. Kramerbooks.

And through this, I grew to love D.C. I had chosen not to live there after college intentionally. The job I was offered there was made to sound inconsequential, and that was by its recruiter (contrasted with the “job” I did take, which started consequential and devolved into a “job”). I was wary of the rudeness of the place (I forget the specifics, but once when visiting Emma during her internship summer, she tripped on an under-construction sidewalk, and I remember watching her receive a glare from a not-at-all-inconvenienced passerby, as though Emma had affronted the passerby by tripping). But more than anything, I think I was afraid of going to Emma’s city. It had become hers during that semester and summer, and I was afraid that even if I lived there full-time, it would always be her city, which would mean it couldn’t be ours.

It was her city. Emma loved the place. Leaving it, to my eyes, was more difficult for her than graduating college. She adored D.C. She adores it still. Pictures of it sit, framed, in various places in this little Texan duplex. She longs to return, and would likely have never left had 1) she not wanted to be a clinical social worker, and 2) the best clinical social work school not been Texas at the time of her application. Though she grew up in Atlanta, her ancestry was in D.C. Her mom grew up in Falls Church. Her parents met in Washington. A string of uncles of hers extended outwards from the city into northern Virginia. D.C. was her first post-college city, and held all that charm, and it was a particularly good first post-college city, full of people of common backgrounds to hers with common interests to hers. And there were the little things that height-controlled D.C. and shut-down-on-weekends D.C. and center-of-the-country’s-news D.C. can uniquely provide. The excitement. The soothe. The sky and the city united.

On my last visit there, before Emma’s last day of work, before Emma’s family came for a week on the Delaware shore, before Emma and her roommate and her best friend from the office sat and cried and remembered, before Emma’s family packed up her things and the movers brought them back down to Georgia, we went—on Saturday night—to Kramerbooks. Emma was hurting. The quiet, constant kind of hurt, where you’re grieving and that grief envelops everything, never far from your mind, always bringing you down at least a few notches even in the most normal of moments. I told her about how we’d come back so many times, regardless of where we landed for the long term. I told her about how we’d bring our kids to Dupont Circle, and we’d take them up that huge escalator from the metro, and we’d walk them past her old apartment, and we’d take them to Kramerbooks.

It’s funny now, realizing this morning that Kramerbooks will likely be gone by then. For some reason it seemed eternal. But time doesn’t stop when you leave a place. People’s lives continue just as yours does. And it strikes me how I wanted it to still be there—how I wanted to come back and reengage with that slice of those two years of our lives.

We do this a lot with goodbyes. We tell ourselves they aren’t permanent. We tell ourselves a reunion will come. And so many times, reunions do come, but they are often brief, and if they’re lasting, the things reunited have been changed into somethings new. Somethings sometimes better, sometimes worse, but never the same. You can never go back. Not in the precise way.

I don’t know that there’s an answer here, or that there’s even a question. There’s nothing wrong with reunion imagery if it helps ease some component of grief. But I wonder if we really need it as much as we use it. We say goodbye to things, and for many of them, the goodbye hurts. Because we loved them.

Perhaps that—that they existed, that we loved them—is enough.

Next week’s essay: On South Bend, and the Liberation of Isolation