I wrote, in April, that 2020’s Easter was the “Halloween of Easter” — haunted by ghosts of Covid-19 mass graves and bleary-eyed zombies walking lonely down deserted Times Square streets. Foreboding and heavy then, I imagined crisp summer nights of healing and a healthy wind, well masked and rosy-cheeked, by autumn. We just had the “Halloween of Halloween” and on Tuesday, I am fists clenched and hopes held on the “Halloween of Elections.” I am haunted by 2016 — still PTSD drenched and drained from four years of constant division, aching loss of family members to fascist values, hate-filled rhetoric around dinner tables. We walked deserted suburban streets last night, ghostly and pale, the masks of American thinly held values ripped off for freedom’s sake. We are tired. It is the Halloween of Years.
Seared against the backside of my eyelids, when I try to close them but cannot sleep, these days leading towards Decision, is a memory of the tear filled eyes of the all-Black, all-womxn staff at the Nashville Airport Starbucks on the morning of November 9, 2016. I’d been devastated, and felt unsafe myself, in a cowboy bar with country music and men with big belt buckles, the night before. So much so, that as the results began to turn towards Trump, my girlfriend and I found the lone gay bar on the street and entered to a cacophony of silence. The tears poured, later, as queer couples held one another…
