It’s Dark In Here

In his entire history on the planet, he could recall only one day that felt darker than this one, and that was September 11, 2001. He could tell you without hesitation the three darkest days of his life in chronological order: 9/11; the first Trump victory in 2016; and then yesterday, the second Trump victory in 2024. On all three of these occasions, hope seemed to fly entirely out the window. He wept real liberal tears at all three of these historic moments more deeply than he had wept for any one’s death, for any breakup, for any bad turn of events, for any personal disaster, or for any natural disaster. Last night he came a hair’s breadth from just laying down on the floor and curling up into a ball. He was in the bedroom, alone, attempting and failing to get ready for bed. Foolishly, he took his phone up there. And at some point, even though it hadn’t yet been officially called, he knew Harris had lost and then he lost all sense of composure, all control of his emotional well-being. He felt like screaming. He felt like the figure in the famous Edvard Munch painting.  He sat in a chair in his bedroom with his hands over his eyes, at times grasping the sides of his head as if he worried it would just explode off his neck. He didn’t quite know how he arrived at this place: on the one hand he felt way too vulnerable, embarrassingly so, but on the other hand, maybe on instinct, he knew that he could not carry on in this manner. He needed help and he needed it right then and there. So he went to the top of the stairs and he called down to his wife. He called her name first, and then he told her that he needed her. That’s all. “I need you with me,” he said. She could hear the urgency in his voice. She understood he was breaking, so she was up those stairs in a moment. She spent the next half hour or forty-five minutes trying to console him, convincing him that they had much to be grateful for, that their world did not have to come crumbling down, that they could make positive ripples in their immediate and intimate worlds. And finally, at some point he had stopped sobbing, calmed himself down enough to lay in bed and close his eyes. And if there is anything he had learned in the first twelve hours of what had become the continuing political, social, and ethical nightmare that is Donald Trump, it is this: we must turn to the ones we love. We must help each other. We must love one another so that we can carry on. It’s the only thing that will give us strength for the oncoming train wreck and subsequent fight against it. If his wife had not been with him last night, if he had been essentially the same man but for some reason by himself, he didn’t know how he would have pulled through. He could not have done it alone.