I’m trying, though.

I’m staying out late at night, and on weekend mornings I’m waking up early. I’m leaving my house and my block and my neighborhood and my quadrant. When I come home, I walk.

***

“It’s like we’re unlocking a new part of the map,” Jack tells me as I back into a Capitol Hill parking spot.

He’s right—all of this existed just beyond the boundaries of my limited universe. Now I’ve pushed the horizon.

***

I didn’t see it as my D.C., but it is.

The H Street Bridge passes over the Union Station tracks. On the walls that line it, mosaic children play hopscotch. I spot the artwork on an after-midnight trek toward the train that will take me home, and I realize it’s not the first time.

I watch the kids—much bigger back then—again through the eyes of my four-year-old self as I gaze out the backseat car window, traveling with my mother to the Capitol Children’s Museum.

The place had often flitted through my mind in later years as I drifted off to sleep. A childhood relic, it inhabited a realm somewhere between memory and dream.

I had never known where it was before.

Molly L. Roberts ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an English concentrator in Cabot House.