I. Hate. Most. Things.

Metro Center, at 11PM on a Friday night in the heart of Washington D.C, is absolutely dead. You might as well be in Springfield, Ohio.

The only other people within a visible radius were the other people who had taken the Bolt Bus with me from New York, and a couple of wandering tranny prostitutes who were clearly new at this. If there are any newbie tranny prostitutes looking to make a quick buck in our nation's capital, head over to Georgetown and Capitol Hill. That's where our closeted elected officials with deep pockets live.

After hopping on the Metro, two things quickly occured to me about the city that I used to call home:

1. D.C. fashion is almost entirely unbearable. People dress in an entirely muted color palette - it's almost like the whole entire city is unaware of the fact that secondary colors exist. And when you see the same outfits over and over again, with hundreds of people dressed almost exclusively in Vineyard Vines, H&M and North Face, it can be a bit maddening. 

2. The Metro is a pain in the ass. It took me about an hour to travel 10 stops because of track maintenance due to single tracking. I know that the MTA often picks the worst times to perform track work (such as the night of Halloween to work on the L train in Brooklyn. What the hell, Bloomberg?), but single-tracking in D.C. is a maddening experience that happens on an all too frequent basis.

After staying a night out in the suburbs of Maryland, I came back into Van Ness (more single-tracking!) to drop anchor with my friends Nicole and Jeff. Jeff was working for the night at The Diner, but Nicole convinced me to brave my cold and dress up for Halloween.

I ended up pulling together a last-minute geisha costume. Behold:

We headed down to the H street corridor to hit up the Rock and Roll Hotel, where I used to throw a weekly dance party. It was nice to see some old faces - the owner Fritz was tending bar and immediately recognized me, but the party was impossible because you couldn't even move, let alone dance. Rock and Roll Hotel felt less like a dance party, and more like a jumbled quasi-hipster DMV.

We bounced around two entirely new venues to me on H Street: Sticky Rice and H Street Country Club. And while drinking serious vodka-sodas at H Street Country Club, I bumped into a girl dressed up as Devo who knew someone I used to have a crush on in high school. Small world.

The following day, I parted ways with Jeff and Nicole after a paralyzing Bloody Mary burger at Matchbox in Barrack's Row. I had some extra time, so I wandered a couple of blocks over to my old neighborhood. 

It was really weird to see how things had changed. Some of the changes were heartbreaking - such as the invasion of Le Pain Quotidian, which eliminated one of my very favorite neighborhood brunch spots in Eastern Market. 

But it wasn't a complete chain takeover: Ben and Jerry's had been kicked out and replaced with a local pizza place, which made me smile. The tax-evading Murky Coffee, whose owner is one of the worst people in the world, had been delightfully outsed by newcomer Peregrine Coffee. 

Sidenote: I thought I had hit the jackpot when I was coming home from a late-night out and I found a 10-pound bag of coffee sitting outside of Murky. I promptly plucked the bag from Murky's doorstep, only to find out it was left there intentionally: the coffee was left outside by the owner for people to use in their compost heap. Prehistoric coffee = epic fail.

After passing through the actual Eastern Market itself (which is just as busy as it was when I left), I turned the corner and came upon my old apartment building; a pre-war called The Saratoga that sits on the corner of 7th St. and East Capitol St.

I don't know why, but looking at that building made me really sad. With My Bloody Valentine playing in my headphones and the weather reflecting my somber mood, I looked up at my first post-college apartment with glossy eyes as memories of everything that took place in my $825 a month studio started to come back.

And then it hit me: When I leave New York, I'm never overwhelmed with this kind of emotion. 

Don't get me wrong: my decision to leave Washington D.C was correct. The city bored me, the transportation sucked, I wasn't happy with my career path and I wanted to roll the dice while I was young and take a chance on bigger and better things in New York. In regard to all of those things, my move to the Big Apple was a success.

When I stepped into Nicole and Jeff's place, it felt like home. It felt like my old place. When I stepped off the bus, it felt like I was coming home. And now, as I sit on the Bolt Bus, it doesn't feel like I'm going home - it just feels like I'm going back to the place where my material things sit, a fourth-floor walk-up in Greenpoint. Which isn't as bad as it sounds - I just don't have an emotional attachment to New York yet.

Maybe it's one of those things that won't come to me unless I decide to leave New York one day.