In This Body: In The Wake
“I marched seven miles in protest, since I had sobbed my soul out”
Our monthly column "In This Body" is comprised of true stories about sex, gender, the body, and love, written by Fiona George, for NAILED.
+ + +
Three days after the election, I was dropped off in my city’s airport five hours before my flight took off. It was the only time I could get a ride, and public transit was unreliable through downtown—through the protests, who knows how late they would go. I would have rather been protesting than flying to Hawaii for my cousins wedding, rather than rip myself over the ocean, away from where my heart was.
Three hours before I was at the airport, I was at a bar with some friends after our writers group. Three shots of whiskey, and half a beer in, shoving a vegan hotdog in my face. My throat was sore and I couldn’t stop laugh-coughing. Despite. Saying shit’s terrible, I don’t like being forced to have a good time, laugh-cough. A moment of joy over the 2008 hit song that played. A moment of community.
The night before that I was recovering from a cold, throat raw with cough, exhausted from trying to pack and shop for the trip in time to head downtown to take to the streets and scream my raw throat rawer with two thousand other protesters.
The night before that was Tuesday the 8th. I sent a text to my boyfriend at 7:30, when it was still early but the map was too red. This election is literally making me want to die. He said, don’t worry, he said Republicans always get the early states. He said she still had it. I stopped worrying and suggested we break out the good scotch when I got off work and the results were in, when Hillary had won.
+
I was terrified to fly, even though I was flying from one blue state to another blue state with a layover in a blue state. I was about to be exposed to more of America than I wanted to see, than I knew what to expect from.
I had a plan: an energy drink followed by cup after cup of coffee. My boyfriend drove me to the airport, I told him if I’m seated next to a man, I’m not going to sleep. The president-elect’s voice in my head, “grab them by the pussy.”
He said, then try to sleep at the airport, while I gulped down the last of my energy drink.
+
On both my flights, I was seated next to women. I leaned my seat back into shallow sleep. And when I landed in Maui, I drank another energy drink and willed myself against jet lag to stay awake until night.
Me and my mom and my sister checked our phones and our Facebooks obsessively. We could not stop talking about the election. When I went to go to bed, I looked at my news feed one more time.
A friend of mine had posted a live video an hour before, from the protest in Portland, the camera shook and the video ended abruptly. After texting him to see if he was safe, I went out to smoke. After my cigarette, I hadn’t heard back. I posted ARE YOU SAFE? to his wall. Maybe someone else would see it and know, but the only person to comment was his boyfriend, who said he couldn’t get ahold of him—that his phone was dead.
What I couldn’t do, no matter how much jet lag dragged at my eyelids, was sleep. The way my heart beat fast the moment my eyes closed, how tears pushed past my lashes when I tried to sleep. What I did do, was stay awake until he checked in safe. I smoked a chain and cracked open a beer and I began to write.
By the time I heard back from him, it was midnight Hawaii time, two in the morning Portland time. Aside from the few fitful hours on the plane, I hadn’t slept for forty-two hours. I hadn’t really slept since before I marched seven miles in protest, since I had sobbed my soul out in despair at the airport.
+
I had five hours at the airport before my flight. I spent it mostly still in anxiety, with bursts of movement when the velocity inside me got too much. An hour in—too shaken to write, too ill-focused to read, too caffeinated and frightened to sleep—I turned to music.
Turned to the latest loss: Leonard Cohen. Songs that were all too relevant, lyrics that I had seen posted in the days following the election—the same days leading up to his death.
Tears rolled from my cheeks, off my chin to my sweater. My nose began to plug with snot. I wasn’t even one verse into “Anthem”—don’t dwell on what has passed away, or what is yet to be—and I could already taste the thick salt of snot on my upper lip.
I put on my sunglasses, trying to cover my eyes. I hunched over my knees, I put my head in my hands and let my shoulders shake. Hoped that I wouldn’t attract any comfort, any well-meaning bystanders—the airport employees, the couple sleeping on their duffle bags a few yards away.
In the silence and emptiness of it, I wanted to be alone in my grief. For just one night, I wanted to bear it alone, to retreat inside of myself and hurt.
After twenty minutes, when my snot had run a river into my hair and onto my sweater—I snapped out. Wiped my face and hair with a panty liner, I got a cup of coffee and wrote a poem on my phone while I smoked cigarette after cigarette.
My nose was raw red and my heart was sore with the wake of the election, and around me the airport was quiet and empty.
+
The second night in Hawaii, the night before the wedding, I was bags under eyes and ready to sleep at ten at night Hawaii time, midnight Portland time. I turned on the AC, got under the comfort of covers, pulled up Netflix and queued up Futurama to fall asleep to, I plugged my phone in and turned out the light.
Soon as I settled in, before I could even press play on Netflix, my phone buzzed two rapid-fire texts. I thought, it was about time my boyfriend texted me back.
It wasn’t my boyfriend, but it was. Our friend, he texted me to say that he and my boyfriend got separated at the protest. My boyfriend had been arrested, and did I know his mom’s number?
+
I feel insanely lucky and grateful for the way I pass for straight. I feel insanely angry and guilty for the way I pass for straight. All of my female partners or potential partners identify as pansexual or bi, all of them have at least one serious partner who is male. Even if hate crimes sky rocket even more, even if it becomes criminal to not be straight, we can keep seeing each other and have the plausible deniability of boyfriends.
Except those of us who write it, or put it into our art.
+
When I heard my boyfriend was in jail, I turned again to Leonard. “Take This Longing,” I was longing to be with him, to hear from him. Longing to be home in Portland, where I wouldn’t feel so useless when all my friends were out putting themselves in danger. Whatever useless things these hands have done.
I have been useless. I have been lazy. I have been naive. Only now has it begun to hurt. I’ve stayed too silent as Black men and women are shot dead by police, I’ve stayed silent as folks in Flint and at Standing Rock have fought for clean and safe water, I’ve stayed silent as women in other states struggle to keep abortion and birth control available.
I have held a belief that everything will be okay, soon, and without my help. I have been cocooned by liberals my entire life, unable to believe that the ugly of this country was quite as ugly as it seemed. Willed myself to believe that the racism in my liberal town was better—or even didn’t exist—because it was quiet and passive rather than loud and violent. Believing that the ugly underbelly of America, was only the underbelly and not the face, and that it would die with Baby Boomers.
I have been useless, and it has taken America electing a racist, sexist, xenophobic man-baby to actually feel useless. For my uselessness to hurt. For it to drive me to action.
+
When I woke up on the morning of the wedding, I had a message waiting from my boyfriend. He had been released around seven in the morning Portland time, five in the morning Hawaii time. He wasn’t there to protest—he was there with his camera, supportive of the march but documenting. Maybe documenting things the cops didn’t want seen, maybe just a little too close to the riot squad.
For the first time on the trip, I stopped looking at my phone for news of protests and news in the wake of the election. Everyone I knew and loved was accounted for and safe.
The fear of what was to come, the tension and anger was not in the air on Maui. Maybe it was all concentrated in big cities. Maybe Hawaii was a blue state like Oregon was: the population of one big blue city tipped what would have been a red state. Maybe we were mostly surrounded by tourists, too well-to-do to care or just trying to escape it. Or, maybe in a state that was made a part of America by force, it doesn’t matter so much who’s running the country, maybe they’re all just as bad.
In any case, on the edge of the ocean, I felt the calm before the storm.
The kind of calm that leaves you uneasy, too quiet.
Even that fell away during the wedding. I got drunk off good scotch and whiskey from the open bar. I ate so much delicious food I bloated till I fell asleep. And the ceremony, was beautiful.
I hadn’t seen my cousin or any of my family from Hawaii since I was about twelve years old. I knew very little of her life or relationship. But, I could feel the love they had. Weddings seemed like something that might be easy to let fall by the wayside in the next four years.
But this kind of break, to get drunk and to get happy, and celebrate the small joy of love we have for each other.
I thought of the wedding of one of my best friends, scheduled for next September, wondered what kind of circumstances will surround it.
And I thought how days like this—weddings or birthdays or graduation parties or book launches or births—will matter so much. Will let us come up for air, will remind us of the normality of life we are fighting to get back to, remind us of love.
+ + +
To read the previous installment of In This Body: "Fabric of Femme," go here.
Header image courtesy of Mirage. To view their photography feature, go here.