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This morning I felt something I couldn’t identify. I was sitting in my yard in Brooklyn, wondering what to do about the ten-foot branch that fell on the walk during the hurricane. I drank my coffee and tried to decipher the feeling.
Oh, yes. Peaceful.
I have not felt this way in four years. I’ve been happy. I laughed and loved. I felt sad. I had a full range of emotions. But for 1465 consecutive days, I did not feel peace. I forgot what it felt like. I forgot it was a thing humans feel. I put on the facade of hope, even believed it, but there is no real hope without the possibility of internal peace. That’s what hope is hoping for.
I ended up in a disturbing place. By the middle of this past summer, my intrusive rage fantasies had achieved a level of viciousness that made me think my sanity was slipping. Holding their heads two inches underwater so they could see the air as they choked. Injecting them with a paralytic and dissolving them with lye from the bottom up so they had to watch. Locking them in a cold dark cage with a steady dose of hallucinogens and a recorded loop whispering “there is no God” until they died of thirst. Darker things. Things I’ve never heard of, or seen. I had dreams where the would-be nightmares ran away from me.
Mental disturbance is gradual, a compounding depravity that grows with every unfamiliar desperation, a recursive hall of mirrors filled with the memories of waking up in despair the day after waking up and despairing. It was the middle of 2016 by the time I let myself understand that the situation was real, and I was already so, so tired. Going to bed every night knowing every good thing I tried to help coax into the world was being beaten down and dismantled every day, and it was going to keep happening for weeks and months and years.
I saw the worst of any country crawl from its plausibly denied hell and take most of the seats at the table, mocking the rest of it for thinking that the hellbeasts were a someday problem, for not grasping that someday was yesterday.
Hearing that horrifying voice every day, with its puerile whining drone, incapable of humor, incapable of grace, incapable of dignity, incapable of honor, incapable of even the pretense of any decent abstraction of goodness, ground my spirit down. Hearing people cheer him broke it. How could this parody of human failure even exist? I put up more walls in my head than anyone’s ever built on a border. Wall after wall of temporary denial and willful amnesia, built hourly to make it to the next time I could skip ahead eight hours. I let go of a pathological fear of death because I was too busy dealing with life to give it any more attention, and because if this was the direction the world had gone, the technological marvels of the future were off the table.
I thought I had hope. I did not. I didn’t wonder if we were going to end up in a post-civilization dystopia; I wondered which one and how soon. There was no thought of peace to power genuine hope.
I have that thought back. There are dark times ahead. Even if a majority of thinking people are beginning to see the relationships among climate, resources, exploitation, nationalism, and racism, we are still living in an age of supremely powerful people fighting over a dwindling reservoir of power, and the fight will kill many more even if we manage to save our species. We are already a planet of dead things; the only victory is to not be among them. This democracy may have survived a powerful assault, but it’s built on a system that will assault it again by design. The foundation has to be rebuilt while we’re living on it.
But I can hope that the government will actually be run. I can hope that it will be staffed, maybe even by people who know how to do their jobs. This morning smelled better. My coffee tasted like something. I pet my cat for reasons that had nothing to do with transactional emotional maintenance.
Yesterday, the city cheered. I cheered. I cried. I couldn’t focus. Four years of madness and coping mechanisms were explosively reorganizing in my head. I drank champagne and watched Reign of Fire, a movie that seems remarkably prescient now.
Today, I was content, for a moment. I was at peace. I hoped that the world would not be consumed by invincible ash-eating fire monsters. For real.
