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I’m writing it down. I want to remember how it felt to wake up one morning with Donald Trump as the next President. Not president of a wine-and-cheese club, not president of a yacht association, but the President of this country, this beautiful, complicated, painfully imperfect place. My home.
I want to remember all those states turning red, one after the other as if bleeding out, soaking the map right through; to remember the Tweets that were funny, until suddenly they weren’t. Until suddenly, I was staring at a screen, out at the bleak, dangerous truth of things. Until suddenly, it was us on a couch, a family of immigrants slowly realizing that this was happening. This was actually happening.
On Election night, I had a dream about Ellen Degeneres. The two of us were having a picnic when a pair of enormous rats burrowed out of the soil to join us. Ellen was totally casual about it, and started feeding them from a box of Ritz crackers. “You feed them too, Hilal,” she said. “Feed the rats.”
“Are you crazy? I don’t want to feed the rats!” I said. “I hate rats.”
The rats were completely pigment-less, with these creepy pink eyes. They were hungry rats. Huge and hungry and greedy and aggressive. One of them climbed right up, and sat, uninvited, on my knee.
I took the next morning off. I cleaned the house, top to bottom, cleaned the hell out of it, purging, stuffing four giant trash bags with clothes for Goodwill. My students were emailing me in a state of hysteria and panic, and I responded until I couldn’t any more. On my yoga mat, I pushed myself, holding poses longer, going deeper, not taking any shortcuts.
I wondered what I would even say to my students that night, to the 37 of them in my social justice class. How could I talk about justice when this was so deeply and clearly unfair? I emailed them, on my way over. “I know many of you are struggling today,” I wrote, “that you’ve had a tough night and an even tougher morning, that you’re running on little or zero sleep. I know many of you were wishing for a different outcome at the polls. I was, too. But the country has spoken, and here we are. We are here.”
I told them we would come together in class to “begin our healing,” to “embrace and cry and express and understand.” I sounded like someone who walks around with an arm full of hemp bracelets, and a FREE HUGS sign, but I didn’t care. I wanted to hug them all, and then have a good cry. A heaving wail.
But in class, I didn’t wail. Or heave. I tried my hardest to hold it together, to hold the space for them, and we gathered: gay and straight, black and brown and white. We came together as Jews and Muslims and whatever else. As humans. When someone’s voice would break, we waited for the tears to stop. We hugged each other. It’s okay, we said, over and over, it’s going to be okay.
And eventually, I began to believe it would be.
I believe it will be okay. I do believe it. I believe this was a rip-the-Band-Aid-off kind of moment that pushed what was hidden out, digging it up from the soil, unearthing it like an underground animal, hungry for food. I believe what we do now matters. And since it matters so much, we owe it to ourselves, to each other, to find our feet, our nerve, to find our hearts; to flick the megaphone-switch on, and gather our tribe. Because this thing that’s happened? It hasn’t killed us. And it won’t. We are not alone.
