2021 August, Washington, D.C.

I.

Small, wet, purple flowers stuck to the sidewalk in early morning. Crickets chirping in the bushes. A curling vine catches my hair as I walk past. Opening my car door, I notice the moon hanging over Harriet Tubman Elementary across the street — an only slightly imperfect circle. Waning now, I think. I must have missed it when it was full.

II.

I park the car in an open space where it will languish for another few months. Most afternoons, I ride through this part of the city on a yellow, fat-tire bike, looking for work in restaurants and hotels. Both are a result of the pandemic; the tires were good for exploring the sandy groves of southern live oak around my mother’s house day in and day out, and now I need income. I find peace making the rounds here, from Odd Provisions to the Dollar Star on Mount Pleasant Street and down Columbia Road into Adams Morgan, stopping along the way to look at book carts and the faded “Menchini’s Califlorida” mural in the alley next to Freedom Plaza… even though you’re really not supposed to ride these kinds of bikes on pavement.

By the time I return to the room I’ve been subletting, my clothes have practically fused with my skin and I’m licking salty sweat from my upper lip. I crank the A/C unit and wait out on the deck while the room fills with cold air.

Cicadas shriek in the walnut tree overhead and I imagine them angry and swollen, clinging to the tree bark and to life. I see the same squirrel on this deck nearly every day. It doesn’t seem to be very good at jumping or climbing, but it can carry a whole walnut in its mouth. The door that opens onto the deck from my bedroom is not properly sealed, and there’s a half-inch gap beneath its frame. So when it rains, a colony of ants moves in. It’s the only reason I’ve been letting a spider reside in a corner of the room.

Other pests include mice and an elusive roommate I wouldn’t know was living here save for the growing pile of shoes in front of his door. Since moving in several months ago, I’ve never seen either of them, but they leave signs of their fleeting presence in the common spaces; I occasionally find piss on the toilet seat or a tiny turd on the floor.

III.

The cicadas make me think about this first decade of my adult life and the choices that have led me down different paths. The dreams that have taken shape or been abandoned, adapted over time. The box of miscellaneous items that I carry from one apartment to the next. From each place, a souvenir of the identities I’ve cultivated:

A piece of frayed string and pressed marigolds between the pages of a Himalayan travel guide. Necklaces I made from shell fragments and little fish bones. Crumpled cans of Hamm’s beer that filled the bottom of my canoe on a trip up the Wisconsin River, lovingly displayed beside a cork board pinned with photos of kids in backpacks and muddy boots.

Versions of myself that I was waiting to step into, like passing people on the street who you swear you’ve met before — and now, a stack of pink slips pulled from my car windshield, reminding me that I need more than souvenirs to verify my identity.

IV.

Later, a pair of entangled wasps falls in front of me crossing 11th and Kenyon. They’re gyrating and buzzing around on the sidewalk. I’m watching them intently, trying to decide if it’s a love match or a fight to the death (and wondering if these are one and the same in a wasp’s short life), when suddenly, a ball slams into the iron fence on my right side. Soccer practice in the schoolyard looks glorious in the light of the setting sun. A boy reaches through the fence to pay for a tamale and soda from the corner vendor — an elderly woman who wears huaraches beneath her patchwork prairie skirt.

My chest tightens and I feel like I might cry. I experience a moment where everything is thrust into perspective: the enormity of the city against the quiet beauty of an evening walk. All of the possibilities that a single lifetime holds, and time measured in countless evening walks.

Heat waves settle, Wonderland Ballroom turns on its neon sign, and the first stars appear like freckles. Night descends.