I’m posting this before we know anything, schedule-sending at 1am ET for tomorrow morning because I have to write something, have to do something with the feeling, even though I can’t articulate much and indeed haven’t been able to for several days.
Tonight I have tried to avoid any scrolling, any watching, as much as possible. I was eighteen in 2016, fresh off casting my first vote, attending my first election watch party and sure the outcome would be good. After that night, I can’t stomach watching the results come in ever again. Someday I’ll write some more about it, if I have anything new to say. That won’t be tonight.
Instead, I sat with friends, talking and playing games.1 It was a nice reminder that the material, the here, the now, the people I love and with whom I share relationships, is what really matters. I hope you have these reminders too, especially during this terrible year.
I got home to my apartment and immediately started to spiral, so I’ll leave you with this, from the Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich. I first translated this poem a few days before Roe was overturned. It’s masterful, cinematic, and true.
IV
I come home from you through the early light of Spring
flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,
the Discount Wares, the shoe-store. . . . I’m lugging my sack
of groceries, I dash for the elevator
where a man, taut, elderly, carefully composed
lets the door almost close on me.—For god’s sake hold it!
I croak at him.—Hysterical,—he breathes my way.
I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles,
make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone
singing Here comes the sun. . . . I open the mail,
drinking delicious coffee, delicious music,
my body still both light and heavy with you. The mail
lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man
aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison:
My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display
they keep me constantly awake with the pain. . .
Do whatever you can to survive.
You know, I think that men love wars. . .
And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds
break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,
and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.
If you’d like to read the rest of the series, they’re publicly available.
I hope you’re taking care.
I can’t believe I’ve never played Blokus but I’m now obsessed.