Alexandra Charitan

A Fathers Day march in D.C. on 6.21.2021.

In May 2020, I was living with my dad in Ohio. I had been furloughed from my job with Roadtrippers—and had no idea when it would be safe enough to truly hit the road again—but I decided to buy a car anyway. Two days later, I asked Kristine, a Fire Drill Friday acquaintance (and fellow arrestee) if I could stay at her Capitol Hill home for a few days to document the ongoing protests sparked by George Floyd’s death. She texted back immediately: “Absolutely.”

I visited Washington, D.C. exactly ten times before I moved here on June 20, 2020. The first time was with my family when I was young; the second with a college boyfriend, then for a Cat Power concert with the boyfriend after that. For the inaugural Women’s March in 2017, a friend and I took an overnight bus from New York and left before nightfall. I took five solo trips in 2019 and early 2020: the first in April to see the cherry blossoms, and four times from November to January to attend Jane Fonda’s climate justice rallies.

During my tenth visit, I joined several incredibly powerful marches and walked or biked dozens of very sweaty miles around the city; on day two, I was offered my job back. On the drive back to Ohio, I suddenly felt about Washington, D.C. the way I once did about New York, and thought: “How soon can I return?” The answer ended up being two weeks.

In the beginning of 2020, I had been living with my mom in Harlem for six months. Already working remotely for Roadtrippers for more than a year, I had began drafting plans to leave the city on an indefinite road trip around the country—following the paths (and staying on the couches) of friends who had departed before me pursuing adventures of their own. My overly-ambitious trip started to take shape at the same time as COVID-19 was secretly circulating around the city.

A mysterious virus may have traveled farther than any of us this last year—but as my Mikey Burton poster says, I “went nowhere, mentally everywhere.” That first part isn’t technically true—I’ve been to plenty of places in the Midwest and along the East Coast in the year since making the 347-mile drive from my Ohio hometown to Capitol Hill. I may not have seen the whole country (or most of my friends) as I expected to by now, but I’ve racked up just as many miles on my mental odometer as I put (or didn’t put) on my VW Golf.

I had barely settled into my sublet at the end of June when my mom told me that my cat, Mozart, was sick and I returned to New York for a week. On July 15, I signed a lease for an apartment on Capitol Hill, but a few days later, I was in New York again. Less than an hour after I made the gut-wrenching decision to end Mozart’s suffering, I drove the four hours home to my new apartment, filled with boxes but still devoid of life. Mozart had been my constant companion for more than 11 years—seven of those in New York—and it will never feel the same without her. For me (and all of my unlucky, but exceedingly patient, roommates), her signature screech and foot-sucking noises were as interwoven into the sound tapestry of the city as honking horns and bus brakes.

My D.C. soundtrack still includes bus brakes, but during the pandemic (and protests) it has been heavy on helicopters and light on horns. My kitchen window overlooks a corner with two bus stops. At night, I sit and listen to the busses arrive and depart; they’re almost always empty. I have an articulated skeleton that I refer to as my “roommate” (he doesn’t say much), but this is the first time in my life that I haven’t lived with an animal. I do not miss caring for a cat and I can’t imagine getting another; but I do miss Mozart, specifically. Quite a few pieces of me died with her but I now understand why they had to. I always joked that if I was a witch, she was my familiar; and now I would say that this past year I’ve felt like a Phoenix rising from her ashes—except that the animal hospital never sent them to me (what’s the statute of limitations on cat cremains?).

Luckily, it’s hard to get lonely in my current studio apartment—which I describe as a “Funhouse of Trash”—due in part to my affinity for things that have faces (whether they’re supposed to or not). My introverted, socially anxious, and self-entertaining tendencies made me uniquely suited for pandemic life. But there’s no doubt that Washington, D.C. was a slightly more civilized place for me to ride out the rest of quarantine: by the time I moved, the infamous traffic had disappeared, and the brick sidewalks, quiet alleyways, and sweeping wide avenues felt far less oppressive than the 24-hour ambulance sirens I heard in the weeks before I left New York.

I didn’t flee New York in its time of need, I fled it in mine. I have MS and a suppressed immune system; I already had one foot over the George Washington Bridge by the time the city went into lockdown—a pre-toilet-paper-panic trip to an UWS Trader Joe’s pushed me all the way to Ohio. In D.C., I’ve been able to live by myself, easily own a car, and walk, bike, or take the Metro. From behind my handmade face mask (or two when the MAGA losers were in town), I have attended countless marches and rallies, taken more than 20,000 photos, and wrote about most of it (or have nebulous plans to, one day). I’ve filled up five journals, met a lot of extraordinary people, and turned the best acquaintances into real friends.

I admired Nicky before I officially met her—or heard her extraordinary story. But now that we’ve spent countless hours exploring the city together, I am constantly surprised at just how right I was to suspect that Nicky was someone worth knowing. Since the beginning of November, we’ve taken walking tours (following our whims or using one of her tattered Nixon-era guidebooks) of Georgetown, Anacostia, and Old Town Alexandria. We’ve explored historic districts, an abandoned hospital, and the Navy Yard. On Christmas morning, she made me waffles and we walked around a cemetery. I could write 10,000 words just about our walks (and maybe I will someday), but it’s hard to believe there was a time when I lived here and didn’t know Nicky—and I feel that way about everyone else I’ve met along the way.

Post-vaccine, and with pandemic restrictions lifting, in some ways it feels like I’ve moved to a new city all over again. The Capitol grounds are still frustratingly off-limits, but I’m now eating inside of Pete’s diner nearby almost every weekend. Diner breakfast is the number one thing I missed from the Before Times—but I’m not sure what I dread more: the return of tourists or the traffic? (Actually, wobbly tourists on electric scooters might be the number one threat to our nation’s capital every day that isn’t January 6, 2021.)

When I visited for Fire Drill Fridays—in between dodging the scooters—I sat on a bench on the National Mall and watched people run around Capitol Hill. I had run on and off when I lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but infrequently, and never more than 2 or 3 miles at a time or because I really wanted to. Both Prospect and Morningside parks have significant hills that I was never confident enough to attempt, but on December 30—around the time I was also running some particularly harrowing mental miles—I successfully ran up Capitol Hill (which is very much an actual hill) for the first time; I’ve been doing it several times a week since.

Sometimes I stop on the Mall to watch the school groups and families, so many like mine when we first visited in the early ‘90s. As they walk from the Capitol toward the Lincoln Memorial, I wonder if they know that in D.C., every landmark seems way closer than it actually is—those sweeping avenues are great for political parades, protest marches, and stunning sunsets, but the grandiosity of it all can be deceiving. If I’ve learned one thing in the last year it’s that, unlike in life’s rearview mirror, the objects on your map of the future are often further (or completely different) than they appear to be.