1. Arriving in DC, I recognized a kind of dread I associated with meeting someone from my past with whom I had once been close but who now summoned only ambivalence. I felt mystified and perhaps a bit betrayed by the chasm -- political, social -- that had opened up between us in the intervening years since I had lived here.
2. Predictably, like so many in my generation, I coped by resorting to irreverence, mockery, and irony. I tweeted about how the building across from my corporate hotel perfectly epitomized the surveillance state/bureaucratic nightmare that our country had become.
3. I documented the hideous carpets of the corporate hotel.
4. I noted with sly approval the word STOP on the barricades in front of the Capitol.
5. The neoclassical architecture was still garish.
6. Underneath this armor of cynicism, I felt ashamed to be an American, or maybe human, at this juncture of history, when we are destroying everything. But it was also early morning of the second day of my trip, and I was beginning to feel more hopeful and forgiving. 'Don't be an asshole,' I reminded myself as I admired the art deco pattern on a grate covering the drain. Someone had designed this pattern and it was perfect. If the world is going to be saved, it will be accomplished not only through grand gestures, but through small, imperceptible -- and largely anonymous -- steps.
7. Such as this elegant wrought-iron bannister and lamppost.
8. And this manhole cover I one day hoped to acquire for a museum devoted to the form.
9. It felt good to run on a wide path, free of cars. In a few years, the Mall would be under water, but its wide paths could be implemented around the world as cities become more equitable and skeptical of private automobiles. 
10. But I didn't want to distract myself with politics. I wanted to think about when I lived in DC and how I had (and hadn't) changed since then. I remembered walking on this gravel path with one of my brothers who had come to march in one of the anti-war demonstrations with me. He asked if I was dating anyone and I said 'not really' and he had gone on to ask what kind of girls I liked, and I had come up with some bullshit answer, because the truth was that I didn't like any of them in the way he was asking about (and, to be fair to him, the way I had insisted that I should be asked about).
11. Just out of college, I was in my early twenties. In DC, I shared a one-bedroom apartment -- I believe it was $800/month (which had seemed like a fortune!) -- with three other people. I slept in a closet because my roommate snored. It was, I believe, a pretty typical life: I found a job, I went to shows and parties with my roommates and coworkers, I played a lot of chess (but never enough to feel comfortable squaring off against the pros in Dupont Circle). By most conventional measures, I was doing well. I appeared happy. Except for one thing, and I was still young enough to 'get away with it.'
12. But that, too, was a kind of mask, because secretly, I was always falling in love but never breathing a word of it to anyone. It was a hard way to live. I was living in a jail of my own creation (or, well, maybe not completely my own, but to some extent.) I could have been more honest; I just lacked the courage.
13. I was infatuated with one of my colleagues at the environmental nonprofit where I worked. He didn't have a girlfriend, though he had just gotten out of a 'serious relationship.' He was smart and funny -- his eyes were somehow impish and kind -- and he had a bit of a beer belly. He didn't 'read' particularly gay, but he didn't read as particularly non-gay, either. He was a good recipient for my projections.
14. We were also friends, both at and outside of work. We went to a lot of happy hours, a tradition in DC. On weekends, we got high and snuck into the pools of corporate hotels like the one I was staying in now. It wasn't that I lacked courage; it was just that I lacked a particular kind. Usually we did these things in groups, but not always. I remember one night when, somehow, we ended up at his apartment where, already very drunk, we tried and mostly failed to do 'flaming shots.' As time does when you're drunk, it passed very quickly, but, because of the circumstances -- and my intense awareness of being near to each other, and both of us in a relatively uninhibited state -- every second felt precious and fleeting. I trembled with the desire to say something, to cross that shifting boundary, but again, I couldn't do it. I had no experience; it felt too improbable, too momentous. I needed to take some smaller steps, not that I had any real idea how. Instead I lived for futile gestures, like the time a group of us went hiking and swimming in a state park in Virginia, and how, on the drive back, I sat next to him in the backseat of the car, where our sunburned legs were pressed together. For as long as that drive lasted -- and like the song, I never wanted it to end -- I felt sure that he would not only detect the intensity I felt, but also welcome it, which was why, after we arrived and he made no indication of having done so, my heart was broken a little, the way it always was back then.
15. This was also the summer Fugazi put out 'Repeater,' which was my favorite record at the time. The band were constantly playing shows and benefits around the city. That fall, they played in Lafayette Park after one of the anti-war marches. Many of these shows were barely announced, it seemed, but we somehow heard about them and always went. If you had to pay, it was never more than $5. Outside the venues, they always passed out fliers: how to start a band; how to make a record, how to organize a protest. (They did not have one called 'How to come out.') These shows were intense but respectful: Ian MacKaye always asked people to stop with the moshing, which by that point, like so much that initially seems revolutionary, had become very old and dominated by young men who were angry for the wrong reasons or expressing this anger in the wrong ways. Fugazi played in high school gyms and community centers where fans passed out from the heat and had to be carried out to be revived in the night air. Listening to them I felt released for a few minutes, which in retrospect was a form of hope, not that I would have expressed it in such terms at the time.
16. As I walked around DC, I was often reminded of imperial power, but I was also reminded of the constant resistance to this power, and how this dance has always been highly choreographed in DC.
17. Another constant: there were still so many beautiful things in the world.
18. And signs of natural resilience.
19. I would never be nostalgic for that period of my life, but I still felt grateful to the city for resurrecting these memories. I felt like I had put something to rest; a kind of grief, perhaps.
20. The reconciliation of our past, it seems, is a kind of legislative process, filled with motions and compromises and vetoes.
21. We live by one law until, outdated, it is supplanted by another.
