  The advertising agency I work for is housed in a hundred year old textile mill. The mill was reclaimed years ago and refashioned into a business incubator, which is exactly what its name implies; most of the businesses here are young, cash poor and hungry.
They are all courting venture capital, or awaiting that magical relationship with Microsoft or General Motors that will make all five employees rich beyond the dreams of avarice and send them to tan on a golden beach somewhere. But these dreams for almost all of us are just that -- dreams. We stay affloat and do our best to keep moving ahead. We take good fortune in the little trickles it chooses to show itself in, and we hope that the next day will find the phone full of voicemails with work offers.
In my boss's mind, we've made it. The yard stick by which she measures out success is the two full time employees and one cash-cow account we have to our claim. That second full time employee is a new hire, and his recent arrival has meant a smorgasbord of vacation time for that same boss. Our apparent competence, coupled with her restlessness, has meant a lot of screw ups and tense moments over the last ten weeks.
Unnanounced days off. Lengthy mornings off. This has also thrust one tired twenty-five year old, on more than one occasion, into the flight seat of an advertising agency overseeing one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars worth of ad dollars per month. And he is me. And he is leaving. When I was very small my sister lived in Washington, DC. We would go visit her frequently and stay in her craftsman style house in Chevy Chase, MD with her roomates whose names and faces time has seen fit to erase from my memory.
What was never erased, though, was the feeling of being in DC -- the feeling that there was a whole world out there beyong the sloped front yard and cramped confines of my parents suburban home. When she moved back to our home town, it would be years before I would go back. A short trip with my dad and brother rekindled the flame.
After that I spent several weekends there, drinking it in in huge gulps and taking ten dozen cameras full of pictures. It was around the time that my ex and I started hanging out with the hellyeah kids that I decided it would be the perfect place to live full time. She and I never talked with any certainty about doing it. It was always more of a fantasy we'd engage in, or something we'd talk about when the rent was late and we wished to be anywhere but the small town we lived in.
But now, as both my experience and my duties have begun to pile up (and my level of frustration at the lack of any sort of structure here) I am really leaving. And I didn't even know it until I met S. I'm not inclined to be very sentimental, or put much stock in odd coincidences. But within the first twenty minutes I knew S, we mentioned DC. Not as some vacation spot or a nice place to get sushi, but as a destination .
Her talk of moving as we got to know each other became a constant. It pushed me to look inside and ask myself why I had dragged my feet so long about moving. When I realized I might be falling for her, I ran out of reasons. So here I am looking through job listings she's printed for me, or talking to someone who knows someone who might get me work. And the pieces are all clicking, Loudly. This is really happening. 
