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"  Because today is both the oldest I&amp;#039;ve ever been and simultaneously the youngest I&amp;#039;ll ever be again, I feel compelled to document some things. First, some facts for the record: I am 29 years old. I am married. I am the features editor at ELLE.com. I live in New York City. And, after eight years, I&amp;#039;m about to leave. (Don&amp;#039;t worry: I&amp;#039;ll still work at ELLE.) When I first moved to New York\u2014the city that Joan Didion so brilliantly immortalized in &amp;quot;Goodbye to All That,&amp;quot; a chapter from her 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem\u2014I was 21 years old, single, and unemployed. It&amp;#039;s been almost a decade since I first moved into the 49th Street tenement my three roommates and I called an &amp;quot;apartment.&amp;quot; For a room the size of my bed and a shared bathroom with a pipe so preposterously hot that I still have a brand on my right butt cheek from the time I backed up into it, I paid less than $900. (As it is with New York memories, there&amp;#039;s no telling if that&amp;#039;s how much I actually paid or rather a fact I like to whip out with pompous old-hand casualness. It&amp;#039;s a New York thing. See? I did it again.) When Didion wrote &amp;quot;Goodbye to All That,&amp;quot; she, too, had been in the city for eight years. She said, simply: &amp;quot;the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.&amp;quot; The thing is: At 29, I feel both very young and very old. Over the course of eight years, I have changed tremendously and also not at all. When I moved to the city, I was down for anything: Excessive drinking? A stranger&amp;#039;s drugs? Terrible company? Sign me up! Eight years later, if I have more than two glasses of wine, my mental health is all but shot for the next 24 hours. And while, under the influence, I used to accuse friends, strangers, and old boyfriends of committing a laundry list of injustices against me, now, if I so much as stumble over the pronunciation of a word\u2014Is &amp;quot;prescient&amp;quot; unfolded crisply or with more of a mushy burr?\u2014I beat myself up over my performance. In some ways, most of which involve the dissolution of boneheaded confidence, I have regressed. I&amp;#039;m kind of more insecure than ever? Question mark? But I have also found out what most everyone finds out eventually: Wild-eyed inconsistency has an expiration date. Period.  Still, I can&amp;#039;t for the life of me imagine anyone, anywhere, having more fun than I had on my 25th birthday in Manhattan. Unbeknownst to me, my best friend was throwing me a surprise birthday that weekend, but out of fear that I&amp;#039;d assume she&amp;#039;d forgotten the actual date, she assembled our friends for a casual gathering at my apartment. (They were under strict instruction that this was in no way an event to rival the actual party.) After a long day at work, I came home to my studio apartment on Jane Street and found it packed to the gills with champagne, pizza, and girlfriends. At the time, our circle always seemed to be rotating in guest stars: That night, our &amp;quot;girl gang,&amp;quot; as we called it, was as stacked as ever. I&amp;#039;ll never forget the lot of us, younger than we&amp;#039;d ever be again and older than we&amp;#039;d ever been before, standing in a huddle in my closet-kitchen, bellowing Jewel&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Down So Long&amp;quot; at the top of our lungs. I was 14 when that song came out. And yet, at 25, I still knew every wound-licking lyric by heart. Four years later and two of those friends now live on the West Coast; one is pregnant; and I&amp;#039;m no longer in touch with some of the others. I can&amp;#039;t remember the last time I was able to gather a group of eight girls together, anyway. But that&amp;#039;s how New York is. Or maybe that&amp;#039;s how life in your twenties is. As Didion puts it, our third decade is predominantly marked by &amp;quot;the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.&amp;quot; And as she so wisely reflects, time in New York in your twenties tends to blur together into &amp;quot;a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots&amp;quot;\u2014the kind of rose-colored memory that fools you into thinking you&amp;#039;re turning your back on the only thing that ever made you happy. Except I wasn&amp;#039;t full-stop happy. I was young. And optimistic. And resilient. And foolish. And slightly braindead. And excitable. And emotional. And at any given moment, as young as I&amp;#039;d ever be and as old as I&amp;#039;d ever been. So, after eight swollen years in New York, I am moving to Philadelphia, a city that arouses so little interest in my friends and family that, when I mention it, they just slightly cock their heads like a confused spaniel. I&amp;#039;d get into the reasons why I&amp;#039;m moving, but I&amp;#039;m afraid they&amp;#039;re pretty run-of-the-mill: a boy, his job, a golden rhythm that somehow tarnished over the course of eight years, but also seemingly overnight. And from a charming backyard patio of a downtown Philly coffee shop, where they have soymilk (even though my New York-bred snobbery assumed they wouldn&amp;#039;t), and you don&amp;#039;t have to wait in line for the bathroom, and you can bring your dog inside, and people respectfully pour their excess coffee into a designated pitcher instead of into a trashbag that will surely explode all over some poor employee&amp;#039;s shoes, I still can&amp;#039;t shake the feeling that I&amp;#039;ve made the wrong decision. And then I remember what Didion said about falling in love with New York &amp;quot;the way you love the first person who ever touches you,&amp;quot; and I remember how good that feels. And how bad. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/news/a24895/leaving-new-york-and-twenties/?click=hprc>