Voenix Rising

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Do you remember waking up the morning after the 2024 election?

That’s if you had managed to sleep at all.

I didn’t exactly fall asleep that night. I basically just shut down.

That’s my stress response, and terror is only one of the many, many things that set it off. Anything I can’t control, can’t contain, can’t explain, anything that rears up bigger than me and beyond my reach can leave me wanting nothing more than to close my eyes, even when I’m not tired.

For me, election night wasn’t about screaming. It was about the silent torment, like being seatbelted in your car and sinking into the abyss of a lake with your hands useless in your lap, the dashboard still lit, the radio still playing, the black water climbing the windows with all the patience in the world.

At some point, I couldn’t take in another thing. Physically, mentally, emotionally, there was nothing left in me to take it in with. I cried until even that became impossible, then lay there hollow and numb, past the point of taking anything in. I wasn’t tired. I was done.

The next morning I came back in pieces, the light coming through an unfamiliar hotel window, the pillowcase creased to my cheek, the mascara streaked down my face. And for those few merciful seconds before I remembered, I was just a woman in a bed, and nothing hurt yet.

And then I remembered.

It hit like a fucking avalanche.

Grief. Sorrow. Shock. Rage.

And a sickness so deep it had a taste, like cold pennies and bile.

All of it thundering down the mountain at once, burying me alive under the covers before my feet ever found the floor.

When I finally stood, my body kept falling, that missed-stair lurch in the dark that never quite lets you land.

There was a before the 2024 election, and there was an after. There was living, and then there was surviving.

Because accepting it meant questioning everything all over again, only worse this time, because now it was clear that basic decency meant nothing to so many people I thought I trusted, thought I cared about, thought I respected, thought I knew.

I honestly didn’t believe he could win in 2016, and when he did, it gutted me. But I could at least try to reason with myself that some of them, in between enjoying the racism, the xenophobia, the transphobia, the Islamophobia, believed he was the guy from The Apprentice.

I needed to believe we could chalk some of it up to the unknown, to what we hadn’t yet seen, because that left me somewhere to put my faith in people. By 2024, they couldn’t say they didn’t know anymore. There were no question marks, no what-ifs, no variables left to explain away. The worst-case scenarios they’d called me hysterical for imagining had names and dates and body counts. He’d shown us exactly who he was, what he was willing to do, who he was willing to hurt. And I couldn’t believe that people who’d watched all of it would send us back for more.

We knew every rancid inch of him. He golfed through a pandemic while refrigerated trucks idled behind our hospitals, shrugged at the dying, and went on talking about himself.

And when this country rejected him, that treasonous, tantrum-throwing tyrant called a mob to our Capitol to take what we had refused to give him. They erected a gallows and screamed for Mike Pence to hang because he wouldn’t throw out our votes. They crushed police officers in doorways, beat them bloody with flagpoles, drove them backward through shattered glass while the seat of our government became a hunting ground. And their Nero sat in his dining room watching it all unfold, watching our Capitol under siege, watching heroic police officers defend the citadel of our democracy against people carrying his name.

He let them fight for their lives while he fought to keep what wasn’t his.

Our votes. Our government. Everything generations of Americans had marched for, bled for, been beaten and buried for, brought to the edge of annihilation because this petulant, power-drunk, grievance-gorged parasite couldn’t tolerate the humiliation of losing.

They knew all of that in 2024.

They knew a jury had found him liable for sexually abusing a woman. They couldn’t hide behind “locker room talk” anymore. They knew about the fraud. The thirty-four felony convictions. The threats, the scapegoating, the promises of retribution. This remorseless, rapacious, rancor-ridden man, whose appetite for humiliation is inexhaustible so long as somebody else is made to kneel, had laid his malice out before the country and invited people to imagine what he could do with fewer restraints.

And millions wanted him precisely because he would give their resentments the force of government and let them call the devastation justice.

That was one of the most incomprehensible, eviscerating parts of all of this: we looked at the suffering he was offering and saw a warning. For them, it was the promise.

And so they chose him again.

And these were people in our lives. Family. Friends. Colleagues. People we made small talk with at the grocery store, stood beside at soccer games, carpooled with, broke bread with, waved to across the street. People who seemed decent. How do you go back to those ordinary exchanges knowing what they were willing to let happen to somebody else? You think you know people. You think you know what’s in their hearts. And then you have to live among them with the knowledge that you didn’t. God, how lonely that felt. How lonely it still feels.

And this time, we knew who was waiting to crawl into his lap: the sycophants, stooges, and sadists who would only be bellows for that fetid fascist flame.

Everything we’d held onto, hope and safety and democracy and justice and human kindness, felt severed at once, like the strings of a marionette cut above its head, the body folding before it could understand why nothing would hold. I needed something to reach for. Some way to stop them, to do something. And everyone I talked to, once they could stop crying or throwing up long enough to speak, kept coming back to the midterms.

We have to get to the midterms. We can get to the midterms. It’s only two years away.

The election we’re standing on the edge of now was barely a pinprick then, one needle-hole in the blackout curtain at the farthest seam of the horizon, so faint I couldn’t tell whether it was something to steer by or something my eyes had invented because they could not bear the dark.

Between us and that light lay two years of minefield, and we knew we’d have to cross it. We didn’t know whose footsteps would stop behind us, or how far we’d keep walking before we dared to turn around.

Only two years. They pressed those words into my hand like a coat-check ticket in a building burning to the ground. It might as well have been a million years when I was struggling to get through the next hour.

Two years didn’t get any shorter just because we needed them to. Some days we spent everything we had getting to nightfall, and that light hadn’t budged. We’d wake with our jaws clenched and yesterday still lodged beneath our breastbones, and there would be another whole day between us and relief.

So we walked, we crawled, we clawed our way through the interminable days, minute by minute when that was all we could manage, holding each other up and borrowing courage from whoever had any left.

And along the way, the absences began to accumulate. On kitchen counters sat lunches packed by parents who never came home; by the doors, small shoes waited for people who weren’t coming back to tie them. There were human beings kidnapped off the street and carted off to countries they had never set foot in, and people shot on their way to work in front of their children.

Dread has woken up before we have every morning since November 6, 2024. We open our eyes waiting to read the next new horror, the next new obscenity, the next new cruelty we couldn’t have imagined the day before. We’ve been carrying it to bed like wet wool, its sodden weight settling against our ribs, the chill seeping deeper as we sleep. We wake beneath it, aching for one unburdened breath before the world asks us to carry anything else.

I’ve known trauma since before I could spell it, and I tried for years to navigate what I was enduring alone. As a young mother surviving abuse, I learned to keep my pain so quiet that I could smile through school drop-off, cheer at the baseball game, and take notes at the class mom meeting while something inside me was coming apart. I kept functioning. I kept hiding it. And I ended up on the verge of suicide.

There are versions of me I still can’t think about without wanting to reach back through the years and gather them into my arms. I’ve learned over and over again that the way through is with other people, through community, through kinship, through connection, through letting someone hear what you’ve spent so long trying to survive in silence.

That’s what all of you offer me and each other. I’ve seen you show up when you can barely hold yourselves together, find words at two in the morning for someone who has run out of them. I’ve been buoyed and comforted by your bravery. Too many of you have sat with a stranger’s grief while still raw from your own losses for me to believe that cruelty is the deepest truth about this country.

This is why they want us divided, at each other’s throats, each of us sealed inside our own small terror. They know we cannot be defeated when we stand together.

The only way out is through, and the only way through is together.

And no, this election won’t fix everything. It won’t bring back the people we’ve lost or heal everything that’s been broken. We can’t rebuild as though none of this happened. We’re changed, and we’ve learned to turn toward people we once would’ve passed without knowing we needed them. We didn’t ask for these times, but we will be judged by how we met them.

When Wednesday comes, we get back to work. We have the work of a generation before us. I want our children to inherit more than our injuries. I want them to have ordinary days that would feel like miracles to us right now.

And no matter what Trump and his cabal of felon-fellating oligarchs, kleptocratic griftocrats, and aspiring authoritarians do, no matter what they try in the days to come, we stick together.

But those craven, conniving, Constitution-shredding bootlickerati in Congress have fed his power, funded his campaigns of persecution, and thrown themselves between him and the consequences. They voted for this. Now we’re going after their seats.

This is our final stand for the soul of our nation, and I’m not spending what’s left of today laying flowers on a future we still have time to fight for.

Yes, we’re exhausted, down to the marrow, in the places sleep stopped reaching two years ago. We’ve spent those years surviving, just surviving, and I want us to live. To draw a breath that isn’t preparation for the next blow. We’ve shown up every day anyway, we’re showing up now anyway, and we’re never going to stop.

And that chance we could barely imagine reaching, the one people kept telling us to hold on for?

It’s here.

It’s FINALLY HERE.

It’s fucking tomorrow.

There will be a before tomorrow and an after, just as there was in 2024. I remember opening my eyes that morning and having to live with what other people had chosen for us.

Tomorrow, we get to choose.

Ignore the polls. Polls don’t vote. We vote. If you haven’t voted, make your plan and follow through. If you have, reach somebody who hasn’t. Make the call, offer the ride, get them there.

Too real to steal. Too big to rig.

We turned our clocks back yesterday, but I’ll be goddamned if we let these fascists drag our country backward another inch. Tomorrow, we spring forward into action.

Now it’s our turn.

All gas. No brakes.

Run through the tape.

Let’s fucking win this.

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