I was but an idealistic little whelp when I failed to vote in 2000. My mother, dear she is, was going to pick me up at college and drive me to the polling place, then back again, so I could vote. All because I couldn’t get my shit together enough to apply for an absentee ballot, yet I was insistent on voting in my first ever election.
I was frustrated and crestfallen when mom's 1990 Honda Civic ran into difficulties and neither she nor I got the chance to vote. Just as well, as Ralph Nader and the Green Party failed to reach their minimum percentage which was critical and would have allowed them to... something. I don't know. It was do or die at the time but I barely remember it now.
Four years later I had grown out of the "both sides bad/lesser of two evils" equivocation used to justify so much apathy. Only cowards remain eternally cynical, and I was nothing but heart half gone at the bar with my crestfallen friends in slurred and slack disbelief that so many could be so foolish as to give that warmongering global embarrassment four more years.
2008 felt far less dire, and instead of fear I watched with hope as the results came in. But, as hope is a far fuzzier key to the table of memory, I have no clue what I was doing that evening. Likely a burrito was involved. I remember how I resonated with joy and appreciation at the historic moment I participated in.
In 2012 I was exhausted and busy, putting a roof onto our home in the hours before I'd go to work for my second-shift factory job. In my rush I'd managed to split my pants, and having lost track of time I had to rush off to vote with some breezy britches. But I also don't remember much from the evening. Likely a gin and tonic was involved.
2016 was a different beast altogether. I clung to a balance that required holding disbelief that such an obvious fraud could win and horror at the prospect that he could. I remember well how I sat on the floor at a gathering in a friend's house, all of us bringing snacks and drinks while we watched the results. It was still light out when the first unexpected state fell red. Was it New Hampshire? No. North Carolina. I knew everything was about to go sideways. One of the other guests spoke of firewalls and kept shifting the goalposts of hope in his heart. Our hosts, a gay couple, visibly shaken, opined over what would happen to their marriage? My partner and I, we left early.
I didn't sleep for hours into the night, clinging to my phone as if the next time I checked it I would realize that I'd just hit my head. I was in the hospital. This was all a bad dream. At work the next day someone brought in victory donuts. I refused to partake on principal. I started what would be a four-year habit of checking the news constantly. What would our new world look like? How bad could things get?
I'm struck today at how traumatic that night was. How deeply I've internalized this lingering uncertainty and dread. Nearly everything in my life has changed since then, mostly for the better, yet I feel both tender and numb from what our nation has been and is going through. It has changed me, and likely most of us, in a deep and hard to articulate way.
It's nearly six in the evening, not yet time to even fret over returns. My household voted weeks ago. At the moment I'm at the mercy of inertia. I pass beads on a string one by one through my fingers. I check the news again. I remind myself that dread is grief borrowed from a possible future. I don't feel the same fear as 2016. The horrors are no longer unknown. In that, I find a strange comfort, at least.
Yet I am restless and wary of hope. And fuck if I don't want a burrito right now.
