Once when I lived in DC - this was ten years ago when I was so young, and I was serving drinks to future and past indie rock stars at Polly's, and interning (aka stuffing envelopes and taking messages) at ILSR, and smoking a lot of pot and cigarettes (Marlboro Reds, even, because I wanted to die that much quicker) and drinking a lot of wine, and I was screwing the bartender who worked at the bar across the street, don't ask me to remember his name (I think it was Neil), and I used to go over to his bar after I got off my shift, and he would shut the doors and run an afterhours with lots of people from South America and he would put on crazy salsa records he had found at garage sales and we would all dance until it was way too early in the morning, and then he and I would go back to my place and have what I realize now was mildly disappointing sex, though at the time it all seemed pretty exciting.
Anyway once when I lived in DC I went to go see a foreign movie that was playing at a one of the museums downtown, don't ask me to remember which one (The National Gallery of Art? Is there such a thing in DC?) because I was forgetting how to use my brain.
It was a Sunday night, and so it was quiet. No one was at the front door to let me in, so I sat on the steps and waited for a while, with some other people who were also there to see the movie. The sky was the color of those pictures above (perhaps even a little darker), which is to say blue, but the kind of blue that is not quite day, not yet night. A French woman who was sitting next to me starting talking to me about a movie she had seen that was called The Blue Hour, that was about this exact moment of the day, when the noise of the day turns into the calm of the night, and the color of the sky reflects that transition.
And I am telling you right now there are a lot of things about my past that I wish I could remember, and there are lot of things I remember that I wish I could forget, but the sound of that woman's voice, while sitting on those wide, concrete steps that faced out toward a huge expanse of a quiet dark (but not too dark) blue sky, telling you that every day there is a transition waiting for you to watch in the sky, that's some shit that doesn't go away. I have had many moments in my life when I have looked at that sky and thought of that woman. I could write a book about where I was and what I was doing and how I had my own transitions going on in my life, but in the end, it was always the same blue, and I guess, I was always the same me.
Except I don't screw bartenders anymore. That lesson I've learned.