A city and a self in transition

Deep breath. 

No, I'm going to need another one before I begin the words.

Inhale. Exhale.

I'm staring out at a lot of brick, and my former office is within visible distance of me. I no longer work at the place I helped build. I work somewhere else, or at least, I will work there within the next 24 hours.

At the moment, I'm between jobs, something that seems foreign to me. I am very lucky to have landed another paying position and I'm eager for that to begin tomorrow.

But goodness, there's a lot of brick in my peripheral vision. The entire structure to my right is brick, as is the flooring of the Downtown Mall, as is the Market Street Parking Garage. The material is an architectural staple around here, piecing together many a landscape into a milieu, it would seem.

Another deep breath. I'm not used to transitions. I spent so many years at a desk catty-cornered from where I am now, doing something I was very good at. That time is over and I'm about to do something else, and the jury is out over whether I'm good at it at all. I'm excited. I'm eager. 

A man plays piano in the corner of an outdoor space that makes up the second floor of a building that had a fire sometime in the past. It took many years and a cultural shift in Charlottesville for this place to exist, and here I am, on my final day of limbo between one thing and the other thing. I sit for a second and listen to to the piano player as he sings something somewhat wistful.

No one here cares about the music he is playing. Some applaud politely but he is mostly ignored. He takes this in stride and keeps on going. He's getting paid.

At the moment, I'm on vacation. I'm technically in a moment before I enter into something new and I'm so scared and so afraid that I've made the right choice. But when have I ever made the right one? Or the wrong one? I've just made choices. In the end, it all works out. My lifetime, as everyone else's lifetime, is finite.

Piano player has turned to Chariots of Fire and I smile, aware that so much of this is all a monstrous joke, but yet there are children who have been separated from their families at the border and absolutely nothing is funny anymore. There's a lot that seems wrong at the moment.

Now the piano player is playing an up-tempo version of Stand By Me, and I'm transported back to being a kid when the film was made at a time when I was the same age as River Phoenix, Will Wheaton, Corey Feldman and Jerry O'Connell. I never really had friends growing up like those depicted in the novel and the movie.