I can write the saddest lines tonight

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Escribir, por ejemplo: 'La noche está estrellada,

y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos.'

As I stood alone in my kitchen tonight, the cold and absolute stillness revealed the distant strains of a trumpet playing taps. 11pm. Most nights there is too much commotion - whether it be external or internal - for me to hear the melody, but tonight I heard both the 10pm and 11pm anthems. Catching a waft of the bugler is one of my favorite small things about living in Arlington, but tonight it makes my heart heavy.

Neruda's poem is about a love lost, but this is not why I can write the saddest lines tonight. I don't, in fact, know why I feel so sad, but I suspect it is the absence of things more than the loss of them. I am knocking around an empty house - my roommates are traveling - and somehow that emptiness has seeped into my bones and into my heart. How did I ever survive living alone in Japan for three years?

Sometimes an unsolicited act of kindness is enough to scare away the loneliness for a while. This afternoon as I walked down a street near my office, a tall man in a cowboy hat and sunglasses nodded to me and said "Hey, how're you doin'?" When I smiled at him in response, he stopped, handed me a single white rose from the bunch he was carrying, and told me that was for my pretty smile - and my boots. He liked my boots. That exchange, a mere 30 seconds of my life, brought a kind of sunshine to my day that is altogether too rare. At least I know I haven't been in DC so long that I've forgotten how to smile at strangers; I have, however, been here so long that I'm surprised when strangers are friendly.

But at the end of the day, I'm alone and empty, with just a single white rose and my ears hoping to catch another distant melody from a bugle that's been put to rest for the night.