It is sunny in Washington and my eyes are wet between the lashes.

It is symbolism, and intellectually, I know how, informed by our cultural paradigms, controlled by our psychology, we are primed to react to symbolism, to make it meaningful. Perhaps it's a sign that our society is generally too well armored: my cynicism is still stronger. Beneath the calls for unity, I get snagged on nationalism, on individualism, on religiosity. Can politics ever be without barbs? Or do we need the reminders not to trust it, truly take it to heart?

Oh Obama, Mr. Justice, stumble through the oath, squint into the sun, foible visibly so you can regain the fragility of being only human - perhaps the only way to be free from that net of expectations and desperation, twined together with rhetoric as crisp as Crispin's day, to somehow evoke optimism for a tomorrow we need and fear, in roughly equal measures.

I am sitting at my big, wooden desk, which used to belong to my late great uncle Steve. Of all the brothers, my grandma says, he was her favourite.

Along the front edge of the desk, the varnish is chipping and has worn thin from the rubbing of wrists. It's the only indicator of this desk's trek into the 21st C. Beyond that, the pen scratches and white out stains, the simple cut of the legs, all defy precision temporal locating.

I remember wanting nothing on this desk but a wide expanse of writing space - how silly, to imagine that writing primarily occupies space not electrons. Because that was back when I wrote. Now, I word process and I do love processing words but it is NOT the same. Somehow, life was supposed to unfold into some new creature who had time for serious deliberation and wasn't prone to clutter. It didn't though. Still just me.

I remember new year's eves where my mom sat at this self-same desk, writing furiously as the clock struck 12. She said you had to do at midnight what you wanted to do in the coming year. I have tried this method faithfully but haven't yet gotten to spend a year at peace in the arms of a lover, a year focusing on simple blessings, or a year comfortably adorned by my own skin. Not a whole year. I don't even think I get to set the theme. And now, come midnight, I feel the pressure of yearning, the pain of the branches of my heart reaching for what I know cannot be reached. Midnight sometimes finds me with tears, hiding from the weight of the dream.

It has been a long time coming, and I still can't reconcile ambition with emotion. I feel the weight of responsibility, but in the dark corners of me, neglected aspects of self sit seeping cynicism. They had been promised a day, not even a whole year. The buried corners of my writing desk, hidden beneath papers dating back far too long and the accumulated cellulose of attempted pragmatism, remind me of what else is hidden, what may be lost, when we just can't make the space.