washington

It’s a crisp fall evening in Washington and I am reviewing the events of the day. I slept in and woke up without the usual anxiety and pounding heart that usually disrupts my sleep. The house is quiet and the sun in peering through the trees and only speckles the walls through the curtains, not baking the walls of the house like I have grown accustom. I walk down the street to the café I used to visit sometimes during college to get away from campus and study. Thankfully the undergraduates from my university’s richer counterpart have not flooded the tables and overstuffed chairs (and outlets) that I used to fight for a spot there. Men in clothes full of paint and grease are ordering soy lattes and biscotti, something I notice now having lived in an environment where espresso beverages still border on pretentious. In many ways, though, the routine is the same for me as always—search for jobs, revise, resume, write cover letter, send. I ask myself what is different. For one, the anxiety is almost muted by my new surroundings. I also must look beyond these initial stages of the application process and realize that I am more myself, no longer dulled by various factors. So every paragraph, every step I take, even being here—all of these are acts of faith, faith that I am called to do something more than I was. The afternoon winds on and I am at leisure to take a nap, disturbed by nothing more than two curious cats. Even eating dinner is on my own schedule and I am not rushing home to comply with someone else’s. There’s a trip to the bookstore where the clientele is as colorful as I remember.
Late at night I sit on the front porch and take in the sounds and sites of dark. Cats bolt out of alley ways and quickly take shelter under parked cars that will provide a few hours of warmth for the night. Music hums from a house across the street, sending out a strange mix of melodies that could be country-western or new age. Traffic glides by on nearby busier streets. Back inside, I soak up the silence and the peace, knowing I may lose it any day now.
I am trying to take one day at a time, sick of the triteness of that approach. It has not been the approach I have taken so far in life, having always believed that everything I do now is preparing me for something in the future. The last year has seemed to debunk that theory for me, but at the same time, the evidence has not fully destroyed my belief in the approach itself.