Emotional architecture

I stood under the Capitol Dome this week for the first time in years and forgot, briefly, how overwhelming it is. Not politically. Architecturally. It is magnificent.

I used to work there, which made it extra nostalgic. This time I walked in and just stood there staring up at the huge dome and frescoes and carvings like a tourist who had accidentally wandered into the center of a civilization.

Every inch of the dome is trying to make you feel something. Significance. Permanence. History. Order. It is propaganda, obviously, but also celebration. A giant painted declaration that this matters.

And standing there, I had the strange realization that we don’t really build emotional experiences exactly like this very often anymore. Now we mostly build gray luxury apartment complexes called The Hazel where the amenities include “a coworking lounge” and a fire pit no one has ever emotionally connected with.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized maybe we do still build cathedrals. We’ve just changed the materials.

A Taylor Swift concert is a cathedral. Going viral on TikTok is a kind of temporary sainthood. Obama speeches still feel like collective mythmaking. Nikki Glaser somehow turns public humiliation into communion. Even Project Hail Mary made half the internet stare into space feeling emotionally repaired by competence and friendship.

And honestly? Securing a rent stabilized apartment now carries roughly the emotional significance of a medieval peasant surviving winter.

We are still the same creatures we have always been. We still want awe. We still want transcendence. We still want to gather together and feel something larger than ourselves before returning to our little glowing rectangles and Slack notifications and twelve open tabs about magnesium.

This week I also released a song called What’s the Matter. Which feels a little coincidental to this Dome visit. And believe me, no one is more annoyed than I am to accidentally sound like I’m strategically tying my artistic output into a larger emotional thesis. I hate promoting things. Truly. My release strategy is to be a tiny emotionally unstable raccoon quietly leaving songs in the woods for fairies to discover.

But somehow a song that I wrote a year ago, and decided to release weeks ago, ended up speaking directly to whatever frequency I seem to be living on right now. So apparently I have no choice but to tell you about it. I hate this more than you do, trust me.

Part of the chorus says:

Cause if nothing lasts Then nothing matters.

I wrote it from the feeling that modern life trains us to skim across the surface of everything, so what’s the point in even trying. We all have wandering eyes, endless options, and constant replacement. Nothing is rooting deeply enough to become sacred.

But I am realizing the problem isn’t impermanence exactly. Some of the most important moments of my life lasted seconds. A conversation. A look across a room. A song arriving all at once. A walk with someone you love.

Apparently all it takes for me to spiral into a civilization-level emotional thesis is one painted ceiling and a trip back to my hometown.

Last night, after getting back to Buffalo, I walked through Delaware Park with my dad during sunset. The hills were covered with the white leftovers of daffodils. The grass had grown wildly after the heat wave, even though it had just been cut last week. Small open fields stretched behind the trees and suddenly the whole park looked almost impossibly beautiful, like the city had briefly forgotten to contain itself.

Nothing about the walk was permanent. But the relationship is. That’s what lasts.

Maybe that’s what the dome was trying to do too. Give us a sense of continuity. Human beings trying to hand meaning to each other across time.

This week I stood under a giant painted dome built by people long dead and released a song into the algorithm a few hours later. Both, in their own way, were acts of hope.