Almost

Sarah and I kept ourselves so busy this weekend, by Sunday night I was ready for another weekend to recoup from the first. We did hours of errands on Saturday, and while they were fun errands (including Christmas shopping!), they were exhausting nonetheless. I had the joy of entertaining Megan with a Mai Thai dinner on Saturday night followed by several rounds of Sequence. Laughing with a friend of over a decade is always priceless. Sunday dawned rainy and cold, but we made it to church and back and nested for the remainder of the day – made a big lunch, did laundry, made cinnamon rolls, and planned our Welcome Back to the East Coast/Happy Birthday, Ashley/Christmas Party in its entirety. (We even know when we need to clean the oven now. Isn’t that exciting?) In short, it was a very full weekend.

Almost.

It felt empty when I went down to the church basement for ESOL for the first time without Allis there with me. Only a half hour before I’d said goodbye and hugged her long and hard under the flutter of autumn leaves catching the golden sunshine on their way down. The whole time I was thinking of when her mom and sisters had come to get her from Kelly’s old apartment, where we’d crashed after returning from our short-lived campaign adventure in North Carolina. Sarah had been there, too, and we’d cried as we watched her drive away – not knowing when we would see her again. But we were all reunited eventually, in an alliance that culminated in the townhouse life we enjoyed for almost a full two years. On this November morning, I couldn’t help but simply be thankful for the time we’d been given, in spite of my grief over the change.

Almost.

Perhaps it’s still just sinking in. Like when I thought I saw Allis next to Sarah at Eastern Market on Saturday, but it was really just a girl of similar build and hairstyle that looked little like Allis at all. Or today at the bus station when I saw someone carrying the Whole Foods “Sack-O-Potatoes” bag that Allis had and suddenly felt pangs of loss. I sighed. Whole Foods, complete with their organics and soy and “We Hate Republicans” bumper stickers, even that is going to make me sentimental?

Long commutes to work without NPR (as angry as it made me, well, all the time) and machine-gun style sneezes just aren’t nearly as interesting.

~~~

Today, with all my boys safely back from their campaign travels, the office settled right back where we left off. Within moments of the reunion, the bickering, coffee-guzzling, teasing, telephone gossip, whining, Diet Coke drinking, insatiable laughing, kitchen-scavenging, and overall comedy-of-errors that is our collective life in the Monkey Pit was back into full swing. It was almost as if the last month had never happened.

Almost.

There is an edge of resignation and despair in some of the eyes and on some of the tongues. What almost was, and will never be. Frequent low-register conversations about committee firings, leadership elections and strategy. Yet the end of the matter is usually a statement such as, “at least we still have jobs.” And it is a sobering verity. Job insecurity, one of my coworkers reminds me, is one of the occupational hazards of our line of work. You can tell by the somber countenance of those haunting the halls who for the next six weeks will work for the walking political dead.

Much, very much has yet to be decided, and the next week will be crucial in determining the course. The almosts of the election will long haunt us, the 200 and 600 and 2,000 vote margins screaming what could have been. But it is not worth paying those voices any heed in a game where there is no second place.