A Wintry Morning.
It was a still, quiet morning. There was nothing that I could hear, nor could I really smell anything, for the cold had smothered any scent that the morning air might have carried. Aside from a lone squirrel scurrying about looking for lost acorns and pieces of pine, there was not a single living thing in sight. The trees stood mighty still, the empty branches bent ever so slightly, forced downwards by the gravitational force of their own weight. Salt strewn asphalt merged into bleached concrete sidewalks interspersed with dying patches of grass.
Still, it was unusually quiet even for a Sunday. The typically early-rising church-goers were not to be seen, apparently hunkered down in the warmth of their homes. The morning coffee addicts that usually littered the footpaths, brimming with the disastrously short-lived energy of an avid nightclubber, were not to be found despite the “We’re Open!” signs on the local coffee shop window. This I found to be very unusual for, were I a coffee aficionado that viewed a cup of joe as the elixir of life, it seemed to me that this morning of all mornings was the perfect morning for a hot beverage that would lift the senses from the weight of the cold. It was indeed unusually quiet, and I noticed this peculiarity within a few short minutes of having stepped outside from the warmth of my apartment building. So still was the morning in fact that I felt uneasy at the prospect of registering the first footsteps of the day on the brittle pavement, unsure of what effect the disturbance would have or what monsters I might possibly awaken.
I plucked up the courage and willed myself on, past the rows of sleeping townhomes, past frozen construction sites and on down towards the Potomac. Just as I crossed the discontinuous railway tracks I caught the first glimpse of the river on the banks of which the capital of modern civilization was built. This river too, much like the morning, seemed immobile and reluctant to flow. No sound did it make either for there was no current nor any wind that might cause wavelets to form on its surface. As I got closer, my gaze turned towards a seagull seated in the middle of the water. Its head would twitch from side to side every now and then in a vain search of some sign of life only to return to its central resting position.
It was just me and the seagull that morning and we felt the weight of the world for there were no other shoulders that helped share the load. The still river seemed to connect us to places far out of sight that relied on the capital for survival. I could feel that weight of dependency, and I was sure the seagull could too.
