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This is the second half of Sarah’s experiences at the Inauguration. Click here to read the first half.

At the first buzz of the microphone that would announce the parade, I swelled – the time had come at last. But as the parade announcer’s voice came over the loudspeakers, I was thrown off. What was this? He spoke like a character from a contemporary film about the sinister banality of the 1950’s. Grease and tanning beds oozing faux-zeal from his person. I decided to ignore him. It was an easy and familiar a stance after eight years under President Bush.

First came small clusters of servicepeople, huddled strong and upright around American flags. Police motorcycles with their lights on escorted them. There was a long gap before the next group—the various corps of service musicians. The third corps down were dressed like Revolutionary soldiers with white ponytail wigs, whether they were women or men. Lex and I laughed like rude adolescents at the small-looking women who could not seem to fill out their uniforms or wigs. Another long gap. It seemed torturous. We had been waiting for four hours and now that the parade had started, it still felt like nothing was really happening. Then the announcer got excited and told us, “Ladies and Gentlemen, behind those police cars up ahead…is…the moment you’ve alllll been waiting for…” I hated that his game show host baiting worked on me, but my heart started to beat faster. Soon, finally, soon, we would come the moment this whole day had been building toward. We would see the new President of the United States, Barack Obama.

All of us on the bleachers stood up, but the red-clad volunteers told us immediately to sit back down. Docile with cold and long-waiting, we complied. Our Nashville friend, though, wasn’t having it and exited the area to go stand up against the fence. And then he was there, inside a car with dark windows. We were told it was him. I stared hard and saw Michele Obama’s dazzling grin, arched eyebrows and waving palm through the dark glass. There was no way to see the President.

As soon as the car turned the corner, Lex and I rose and scuttled down the bleachers, moving like mindless insects toward a source of warmth. As we got out onto the sidewalk, we saw Joe Biden and his wife coming up on foot, calm and waving in their simpatico blondeness. I felt a twinge of guilt for not having waited for them. But I stopped to take pictures through the fence. Joe, who even when he wasn’t smiling seemed to want to be smiling. It was almost like life was too easy for Joe. I liked him. Something about him brought needed levity to the servicemen, the 50’s announcer, the looming black figures on top of the buildings and the fact that Obama had been hidden away behind black windows.

As soon as he passed, we turned down 12th St., through the now-moot security gates and back toward the Washington Monument. On Constitution Ave, we saw the school bands staying warm by playing and dancing. A girl in a gold, full body leotard danced to a brassy spirit-booster. I wished it were August. For about eight minutes, we were stopped by the police at an intersection, not knowing why or how long it would be before we were allowed to continue on our way. Lex proposed turning in the opposite direction, toward the Capital to get around it all. This proposal filled me with a desperation that would have been wild if I’d had more energy. My physical impulse was to begin climbing something. “Let’s just wait,” I said and pressed up against the chain link fence to watch the Arkansas marching band. Then after a few minutes, we were allowed to cross through the line-up of parade performers and get onto the hill around the Monument.

We’d seen it at sun-up, now we saw it at sundown. Its red eyes flashed high above and the fat, orange sun washed it in fiery rays. That sun was so beautiful. Enough to make us forget how cold we were for a few moments. I wanted it to get caught in the branches of the trees. I tried to take pictures to hold onto it but knew no picture could have competed with my memory. It was not just the sun, it was the feeling. Its setting was proof that the day had happened. Whatever the TV would say, the radio, the magazines, blogs and future history books, I had my own version of what had happened that day and what it meant for me could never be obscured or re-spun. I knew that the day would become more, not less clear, as the years went by. I was certain that fifty years hence, it would live in my mind like the blooming rose of the Little Prince. I would tend it and never let it die.

After we left the monument, the light went out of the sky. Walking home was like picking up the misplaced props, sweeping the stage and shutting off the lights in the vacated theatre after a sold-out opening night. Every action was auto-pilot, feeding off a reserve energy hidden somewhere behind my kidney. The tired, drunken, glowing afterward.

I have no memory of the walk between the DAR and finally turning on to R Street. Once inside our friends’ house, we quickly collapsed, traded stories with our hosts and ordered Chinese food. After we ate, Lex took a hot bath. I asked her to save the water for me, but she forgot so I just took a hot shower. Each time the temperature dropped a half degree, I’d turn the knob a little further to the left, eking out every last degree. Some more people came over and together we watched the first dance at The Neighborhood Ball, replays on CNN and, finally, “The Daily Show.” It was good to be together with peers. We sat in a dazed, collegiate comfort, feeling young, lucky and a little off of our footing.

The next day at dinner, our friend, a lobbyist for the Clean Water Protection Act, said “Bush has been president for my entire adult life.” A post-traumatic shiver went through me. It was true. I had lived it and I still didn’t accept it. I remember a poem I wrote on Nov. 2, 2004: “The coffin that’s enclosed us can now begin to be dismantled,” That premature poem was only starting to be true now, four years later. I felt like a freed prisoner who was still coming to terms with her freedom. Somewhere deep inside I was singing but cast over that was a net of caution, like the screen of one’s fingers to ease one into the full view of something much anticipated, something though, that might not turn out to be quite what I imagined.

But what was I really afraid to see when I uncovered my eyes? If Obama spoke true, if we are the ones we have been waiting for, then isn’t the view that I was afraid to see, the view in the mirror? Maybe the reason so many came to see Obama on Inauguration Day is because so many of us for so many years—for African Americans since their ancestors’ first days on American soil—have not seen ourselves reflected in our presidential leaders. The greed, secrecy and war-mongering of our last president shamed us. Was this our reflection? Maybe it was in witnessing the incongruity between ourselves and what we saw in the mirror that we came to reassert ourselves as democratic citizens and rally for a leader who would truly reflect our values.

Many of us now can say that we see ourselves in Obama. And many of us understand that to continue to be happy with our reflection, we must stay engaged in the democratic covenant. While Obama brings us together, it is also essential that we maintain our individual identities, experiences, values and insights. Groupthink is not the goal. As James Surowieki who wrote The Wisdom of Crowds explains, “independent individuals are more likely to have a new information rather than the same old data everyone is already familiar with. The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.”

It is beautiful that so many came together as one on Inauguration Day. At the same time, to be an intelligent, enlightened democracy, we must also retain our individuality. We must think our own thoughts, we must maintain our own beliefs, and we must tell our own stories, even as we come together to change the world.