day 2: when congress is away

There are things about some architecture
to which I’m magnetized but I’m not sure why

You make it to the top of Capitol Way S
It’s one of those domes that doesn’t get any bigger until you’re right on the mall in front of it, smack dab in front of all that white colonizer wannabe-ancient-Greek grandeur

I’m partially convinced some of those buildings were dragged from the depths of Atlantis
all long-dripped water damage on stone and layers of moss you can date like the rings of a tree
The dome used to be like that and I fell in love with the mood.
In the half-year before I left they’d pressure-washed the whole thing and it was tan underneath--
I remembered my uncle telling me about old beat-up guitars and how cleaning them can change their entire sound--
and I felt betrayed for some reason.

I feel guilty for liking it this much but
One of my favorite things to do with someone I had no set plans with was go inside.
I shot a student film in the O’Brien Building on a May weekend
Not needed, floated from the office space to the restroom,
spent an hour there grieving for my Nana
with Perfume Genius echoing off the floor and comparing my skin tone to the walls
A sanctuary, appeared, gone after.

The Legislative building was ten times the material
black and white and old brass and wood all over
force-fed air in the public spaces, poorly circulated,
but I hadn’t seen such open air above me--
the songs crowding my head suddenly had room in it,
living in the echoes.
We almost made it up to the roof once by following stairs when no one was watching, but locked doors will scare me away from just about anything.

It was a good place for me to just walk and look and drink in.

I wanted to lay on those steps for as long as it took them to carve all that marble.
I wanted to grind my heels into George Washington’s golden face
and sing the last third of Saint Claude to the sunlit-stuffed emptiness
and hear it come back to me.
A weird place to find solace given all that goes on in the halls adjacent,
and no place to find idols,
but there is a ruined holiness to it, for me, all the same.