Felled

Felled

I’m in my Safe Place. My little writing "cabin in the woods.” But Mother Nature is weeping. I know this because I hear not the sound of tutting squirrels and happy birds, but the angry drone of a chainsaw as a worker hacks  limbs off the tree next door. The branches, which have grown strong and healthy for years, are falling too close to home, literally outside my door.

But all is not lost. Switching on Spotify, the first voice I hear is Barack Obama’s, thanking me for taking the time to vote today. I guess Spotify stopped functioning along with the rest of us… enough to forget that it’s now The Day After.

And I cry.

Buzz. Hack. Thud. The sound outside my door. That feeling in my gut.

I struggle to get all the sick and troubled feelings out of my heart and onto the screen. I want to take the hate and the fear and the dread from my soul and smear this page with it. Then I want to shut it down and never see it again. I know I can’t do that; I must move forward, embrace the day, all those obscene things we have to say at times like this. That Hillary was forced, no doubt surreally, to say today.

I woke up yesterday with hope. I was too giddy to focus 100% on work, instead obsessively checking into social media and planning my pantsuit for the evening’s festivities. I was going to spend this historic evening with my two most cherished female souls: Mom and Amelie. I was going to let my 10 year old daughter stay up to watch a new era unfold; an era that would include and embrace her, and everyone.

We ushered in a new era, all right, and it happened fast. One minute I was sipping my tempranillo and smiling; the next, I was fighting down the hammering in my chest as I stared at so much Red. Red for hate. Red for anger unleashed.  I felt as if I’d entered the Upside Down. I held on by my bare fingernails as the numbness set in. Watched the tweets unfold with fury and fear and confusion. Stumbled to bed, finally convinced that I wasn’t going to miss that historic moment when she took it all back. Heart still hammering, sweat pooling in my armpits, I tried sleep. Finally fell into a fleeting sleep and woke up minutes later, checking the phone. It was 1:45, I think. Radio silence, it seemed. No one dared declare it. But we knew.  

Fell back into a restless sleep and dreamed that Trump was following me and my daughter to a US event that was supposed to be for families. He was pretending to be reading a menu but he was making some kind of punitive arrangements for us. I was pissed. I was scared. And I woke up and checked the phone again. Angry, sad, desperate tweets, and some headlines (took three tries to enter “CNN” into google for all my hand shaking), not really declaring anything, but pointing to an almost certain upset. A trouncing! hissed the word in my head. All the voters’ anger and vindication, wrapped up in a suffocating blanket of hate, slapped me every time I refreshed my screen. The first time I saw what I swear was the devil himself staring out at me from a crimson background, I gasped. My mouth went dry. My heart slammed once again against my chest, reminding me that this wasn’t a dream.

The world is different today. The tree next door will survive (I hope) and the hacked limbs will be taken away where we can’t see them anymore. But the damage is done. The sun is brilliant today, which is so ridiculously, perfectly naïve. It’s what I cling to as I prepare to talk to my daughter, as I make dinner, as I walk the dog, do the dishes, write this memory, and try to pretend that life just goes on.