Picture a painting. The trees that line the left side of the sidewalk are lit up by streetlights, making them glow orange against the wet blue evening sky. The headlights on the cars that drive on the road that lines the right side of the sidewalk make the pavement shine, and an umbrella-equipped couple are walking away from us on their glistening runway.

When I look at this painting, the road is no road at all. It’s the reflection pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. And instead of a couple with an umbrella in hand, it’s me on that sidewalk, walking with my classmates from Contemporary Issues, a class of five students that travels to major U.S. cities throughout the year to attend Model Congresses. We’re on our way to the memorial, and the goofiest member of the group has just loped away from the pack to fill up his empty bottle with reflection pool water. This, he says, is important. This is his future.

We nod, all too familiar with his presidential goals, and again I am reminded of how simultaneously proud of and intimidated I am by the four friends that surround me. All with high hopes, all beyond capable of achieving them.

Our stray member runs to catch up, yelling at us to wait up and trying not to spill his souvenir.

“We can’t wait for you every time, Billy,” Kayla says, sighing out of her smile.

“Yeah, Billiam, hurry up,” adds Periklis.

“Yeah Billiam,” says Jameson, imitating Periklis’ voice crack.

“You know what, dude?” Periklis says as he stalks away, returning a second later to crack a joke about our should-be-retired, well-connected teacher, whom he (in)appropriately refers to as Ms. Muffin.

The harassment continues until we get to the top of the memorial steps, where we half-watch the drunk college students take selfies and half-listen to our teacher spew out a few facts that she most likely learned from one of Lincoln’s distant relatives herself. Billy, who was listening the whole time, starts asking questions as the rest of us drift off to other parts of the memorial. I step back a few strides and take in the view from outside Abe’s covering. I take in his Gettysburg Address and his Inaugural speech carved into the walls, his own authoritative, warm face, and the names of the 50 states carved into the outside. And I’m struck by how connected I feel to everyone. This memorial, this capital – they are things we can all claim as ours together and ours alone.  It’s common ground in a world that seems to focus on our differences.

I turn around to see Periklis sitting by himself on the steps that face the reflecting pool in a rare moment of introspection, Kayla taking a picture of the memorial to send to her best friend, and Jameson examining Abe, his favorite president, from up close.

Without speaking a word we congregate over the spot at the top of the steps from which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Without speaking a word, we knit ourselves into a tight circle around the engraving on the ground. And without speaking a word, we let our own tears fall. Just five unlikely friends.