Is it over?

I used to think it was funny, how much older a President looked after eight years in office. But given that the average American seems to have aged eight years in the most recent four-year Presidential term, now all I have is empathy.

It’s not just that I can’t readily fix my Bonnie Raitt-style streak without help that the pandemic cannot provide. It’s that I’m not certain it’s not really a Bride-of-Frankenstein like situation, occasioned by being hit by the cosmic lightning of the double punch of narcissism and sociopathy, a marker to show I survived.

To be clear, I love Bonnie Raitt. But I would have preferred said lightning channel some serious musical talent into my veins instead of taking my precious Belle-like hair. I suppose the good news is that the locks I chopped off at the beginning of the pandemic will be back before the pandemic is over.

But I digress.

I feel older, I look older, I am older. But the nation feels both relieved and like it’s suffering the early stages of PTSD, checking behind the doors, re-reading the news, wanting to believe the worst is behind us, but never again able to be naive enough to think it cannot be again.

It’s hard to remember all the damage. Easy to remember the last election night, when it felt like every wrong done to every woman I knew had been done again — not just because a highly-qualified, competent and talented woman had been derailed in favor of, at best, a charlatan, but because said charlatan had been accused of rape by dozens of women over dozens of years. None of it seemed to matter, and friends muttered about holding their noses, wanting conservatives on the bench, saying something about the lesser of two evils. Kind, lovely, human people did this.

But women I knew wept. Through that night, and into the days that followed. The gut punch of knowing every thing you ever hoped above all evidence to the contrary had been taken — that women mattered, that their lives, their bodies, their dreams mattered. It was gone in one weird night. I put my little girls to bed, frustrated, angry, teary, unable to explain to them why they couldn’t stay up late anymore to witness history.

And then it all came — Muslim bans, caged immigrant children ripped from their parents, lies, lies, more lies, nepotism, transgender bans, awful awful Supreme Court confirmation hearings, tax breaks for people who already paid no taxes, raids on churches looking for “illegals,” so much more…and then unbearable loss. Pandemic. Jobs gone. People gone. Schools gone. And for what? Just the lies.

But now “they” are in the rearview (their pulpits have been taken from them, only following insurrection), and we look around wondering where we go from here. Is there a return to normal? Is there a new normal? Is truth a construct, did he take that, too? Can we re-establish a common norm, some re-set that puts us back on the path we all once agreed on?

But maybe that truth was a construct. At least to people like me. I only shared that common path with people like me — while others walked a different one, rockier and with a much more severe incline. This great…experiment? with politics pulled back the curtain on many fronts, even while the Emperor paraded among us naked. Ugh, sorry. Metaphor and imagery sometimes collide in awful ways. Regardless, we can’t ever ignore again that the good old days weren’t always good — but tomorrow could be worse than we thought.

Most of us survived. Many didn’t — gone to transgender panic, to racist policing, to “very fine people” making their ugly voices heard with their cars. For those of us who remain, though, what do we do? What have we done?

Will everything become a joke in the end? A funny reminder of how things could be (worse)? Will we forget the atrocity of it all, how humanity changed? Or will it seem worse then, when more of the truth comes out?

There wasn’t a point, was there?

But then even in the dark, the confusion, in the forced solitude…we made friends. We took food to sick neighbors. We made each other laugh. We organized and marched, we showed up in places where maybe we wouldn’t have been comfortable before. We spoke up. We realized how truly sweet it was to be able to hold a friend’s baby, to hug our own mothers. We made choices and drew lines, found allies, and hope. It wasn’t enough, it didn’t have to be that way…but it was something.

Nonetheless, I just want to make sure — is the other part over yet?