I lived in the Boston area for another three years after college, working first at Harvard Medical School, and then at CTDS, a small school for emotionally and neurologically impaired children then in Brookline (the school has since relocated to the site of a former dairy farm in Lexington, MA). I loved Boston, but was ready for a change after seven years.

At the time, I was in my first long-term relationship. Hal and I met at a local club in downtown Boston, and began dating in 1986. He was living in North Reading well north of Boston, and attending school even further away, in Wenham on the North Shore. After a year of dating, and after Hal's graduation, we decided we wanted to begin living together, and that we'd try someplace other than Massachusetts. We both made lists of the places we wanted to live. Washington, DC, wasn't in the top three on either of our lists, but it was the first city that appeared on both, so in August of 1987 we quit our jobs in Massachusetts, piled our belongings in a U-Haul and drove to DC, where we stored our furniture in the basement of my great-aunt's house in Arlington while we looked for jobs and a place to live (yes, we had moved down here without either... the folly of youth). Hal and I broke up before our first year in DC ended; we were better as boyfriends living apart than as roommates living together. We've remained close friends, though, and I introduced him to Erick, his current partner of thirteen years.