The night before it happened I sat down to make a painting, and that’s when I knew. It was the worst painting I had ever painted, and with each stroke it just got worse. Something was repressed, and it went from the brush to my stomach and pulsed through my entire body, tightening. Slowly a subtle destroying was creeping up my spine, and the painting was awful.
I needed human contact, so I walked over to the milk dairy to see Troy. It was a cool Kauai night, stars scattered over the sky. Troy’s shift was ending, just a few goats left. “I’m scared about tomorrow,” I startled him through the screen door.
“What’s tomorrow?” he asked, “oh.” He told me that he understood, but there is no reason to worry. No way that Trump would win, he assured me. Everyone was saying so - all the flat truth was saying so. There was no way that Trump could win. He cited some statistics I’d also seen that day on Facebook. My head nodded, convinced, good enough for it. Convinced. Body recoiled though, still utterly sickened, quelled only to the smallest degree by that nodding.
As reassurance continued to beat against the weight of the body, I needed to call my boyfriend in North Carolina. He was energized. While I was alone with the Hawaii moonlight, he’d just come home from a long night of volunteering at the local Clinton office. His job had been “helping to clean up” after “getting out some last minute calls!” Just in a different tone, happier and quicker, he recited almost word for word the same exact mantra that Troy had. The same statistics we’d all seen on Facebook that morning.
Mass recitations, something wasn’t authentic. Mass recitations, something was wrong. But my head, it nodded, and I kept the chatter on all morning. I took it with me everywhere I went. I needed it, repeated it, constantly, constantly. Maybe the liberal radio and its mantras speaking to and regurgitated by my liberal, educated mind could serve to calm. To reassure. But with the aging morning and the repeated, repeated statistics spoken by smug voices, the farm that held the airwaves everywhere I went only grew more and more grotesque, more false. I felt imprisoned, suffocated, my body bowing. We tore away in Kelsea’s car.
“How are you?” she asked, bright and cheerful as ever. I’d texted her the night before to ask if I could come over to watch the elections, because I didn’t want to be alone. She said it hadn’t occurred to her to watch the elections, but sure!
We cruised by the mountains, oceans, palm trees swaying. They knew too. The radio could chatter all it wanted, but they knew too. Something deeper filled the air. “We’ll figure it out,” those palm trees seemed to say, “or we won’t.”
We stopped for lunch at the Healthy Hut, where the employees always seem like they’re partying. “Aloha!” said my surfing friend Jake, with a big smile and hug, “How are you?”
“Good,” I responded robotically before correcting myself, “actually awful! It’s an awful day!”
“What’s wrong?” his eyes creased concerned.
“I just feel a lot of anxiety about the elections, like, in my body…”
“Oh,” said Jake, loosening, relieved, “ so it’s not a bad day…”
“It’s an objectively bad day!” I assured him with a manic smile. He smiled back weakly, and returned to his shelving. He had no Facebook statistics to recite. It had all already passed over him, like a wave. There were realer things to focus on. Shelving. The sunshine. Waves. “We should go surfing this weekend,” he told me.
At Kelsea’s the TV was on, but housemates milled about, hardly paying attention. I alone sat frozen before the TV, waiting sober for too long as Tyler took too long to come back with those beers. Kelsea tried to sit with me, but eventually retreated to the kitchen to make tostadas. We had to eat.
As results slowly, yet abruptly, overturned liberal mantra expectations to liberal confusion, body winning over head as it always does, Tyler - returned finally with the beers - was talking about what it had been like to work the season at Lake Tahoe. He told a story about how once, on a trip to Utah, he’d broken his arm and shocked the nurses when revealing to them he had indeed been smoking marijuana. We talked about the United States in all kinds of other terms - anecdotes, mountains, road trips and raucous nights, where we were born and where we’ve lived and what we’ve seen - grasping for other experiences of this country while the news anchors sat shocked on the screen, living the heart of its horror. I looked at them with one eye, and Tyler with the other. None of them had voted, the housemates admitted. But what would it have mattered? They already knew too, like the palm trees and the ocean. They’d made their peace long ago. We ate tostadas. They gave me a hug.
Texts from the mainland dwindled. We didn’t know what to say to each other anymore, without our pre-packaged recitations. They hadn’t taught us what to say when truth crashed forth, and all of us felt as though drowning. We hadn’t learned to use these eyes to see, and now they opened to a dark dimness, to a - Oh, so this is how it is.
I walked out to the cliff to watch it. The ocean crashing forth, one and the same with truth. “There was never hope,” it taunted, knowing more than I ever could. Knowing everything.
“This was always coming,” twinkled the stars in agreement, reassuring, somehow.
“You will get through it,” rustled the palms, suddenly utterly indifferent to our human shit in this enormous, wide world we’d dared to fuck with. “Or, you won’t.”
