Home is where the heart is, but mine’s still stuck at a light on Route 50

Fairfax County is the least remarkable place in the entire USA. Full of chain restaurants and highways. People move there so they can have good jobs as government contractors and their kids can go to good K-12 schools, so that those kids can go to good universities where they can get good degrees that will get them jobs as government contractors. It’s all just traffic, functioning alcoholism, and never-before-seen unaffordable housing prices.

I do not recommend living there or even visiting. There’s little reason to. And that’s not to say that Virginia as a whole isn’t great - because it absolutely is. Richmond is great, the Blue Ridge mountains are great, even Fredericksburg has its charm.

D.C., though not in Virginia, is actually quite nice - most people who talk about it haven’t really been there. They think of the metaphorical “Washington” - which nobody in the area calls the city (it’s either D.C. or sometimes just “downtown”) - the non-existent place that’s home to the politicians, or they like to talk about this terrifying, crime-infested city that doesn’t exist either.

Recently, I was in Savannah, and I spoke to a man who owned a cigar shop. He said that he would never ride the metro these days because there’s so much crime. The only thing criminal about the metro is the fact that it only runs until 1 AM now, and that’s only on weekends! It used to be open until 3.

With all that being said, Northern Virginia is my favorite place in the world, purely due to the familiarity. I have never grieved anything more than my childhood home, not dead relatives, not my worst breakup. If I gave you a tour of the area, I could give you stories about every place we pass on the highway.

It would go like this: my friend and I used to go to the Burger King next to our neighborhood all the time in high school, just to get milkshakes and fries; and Every year we went to Baskin Robbins for a field trip in elementary school; and my best friend and I used to walk in the park behind my neighborhood and tell each other scary stories; and my grandma and I used to watch the turtles at the one closer to my high school. I’d pass that one on my way to work everyday in senior year. I could show you the hospital where I was born. The gym where my graduation ceremony was held. The lake where I took my junior prom pictures. The houses where my friends used to live, the schools we don’t go to anymore, the neighborhood pool that probably got rid of the payphone on the wall - we have cell phones to order pizza from now.

I could go on for hours and tell you every story I have, but I lived there for 20 years. Almost all of my stories are there. When you read my writing, you’re reading pieces of me, and I’ll always be a girl from NoVa.