I know you feel terrible. I know you spent all night trying not to look at the historically unreliable New York Times needle, which turned out to be intolerably accurate this time. I know you smoked cigarette after cigarette, I know you drank melted ice cream as a sleeping potion, I know you cried so much you could drown in a sea of ​​your own making. I know you hugged your daughters and wondered, What kind of world can she inherit when this country hates her so much for only having a body? I know you feel like you’ve woken up in a familiar hell, because we all have. Of course he feels so bad: we were full of hope again.

As the election results kept dropping us, it became abundantly clear that a Kamala Harris victory was not going to be inevitable. By the early hours of Wednesday morning, Donald Trump was announced as the winnerfair (in an unfair system) and square. I know it feels like the sun is blocked out for good.

I don’t have it in me to do the whole unbiased journalist thing—not that I ever have—but it’s just too bleak to even pretend that this is anything other than a worst-case scenario. I’m too afraid to perform. I was afraid in 2016 too, but eight years ago, we didn’t know what to expect. Now, it’s the fear of what we already know and the fear of what we can’t even imagine.

The choices in this election were ultimately between two bad ones: one, an administration ready to support an ongoing genocide, and another gleeful in repudiating abortion rights, restricting trans freedom, terrorizing immigrants, and of course supporting it. even of that genocide. There will be no real victory in the results of this election; it was just a choice between the irreparably broken and the devastating, skull-crushing, irreparably broken.

But the crushing and irreparably broken option feels worse still. There is no subtlety in what the Electoral College results tell us: This is a country where half the population is content with their hatred of women, of queer people, of brown and black people, of anyone who comes to the United States from a poorer country. A Republican candidate for president has not won the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004, and while the final tally may still be pending, the fact that Donald Trump has swayed a majority of the country in his third attempt at office is damn shameful. Could I find more elegant language for this betrayal by people who are supposed to be my neighbors? Could I be gentler about the majority percentage of Americans who are content to align themselves with the basic tenants of brutality? Not. It’s a waste of time, and time is what we never had. Hillary Clinton called them a “basket of deplorables” in 2016, and Joe Biden called them “garbage” a few days ago. Rhetoric may be losing elections, but it is still too soft a language for this current moment. More than 50 percent of the country wants to shape the republic, more and more, into something inhumane, inhospitable, destined for fascism and decline. In 2016 and 2020, journalists and academics and voters alike have tried to “understand” the Trump voter, to better understand their policy choices. I don’t care anymore. There is nothing left to understand.

Despite this, Harris is still to blame for the result. It lost voters in places like Dearborn, Michigan, which is predominantly Muslim, a region Biden easily won in 2020. Her rhetoric on Palestine has also been inhumane, her continued and vehement support of Israel’s siege of Palestinians an impossible obstacle for many center left voters of even. consider. Nothing was more short-sighted than the Democrats sending Bill Clinton to give a speech days before the election, saying Israel was “forced” to kill more than 41,000 people in the last year. Cruelty is often the key, and that’s true even of a party that can’t recognize its own cruelty.

In the days leading up to the election, Octavia E. Butler’s 2000 essay, “Some Rules for Predicting the Future,” began to go semi-viral among voters on the left, encountering an overriding horror of whatever it was supposed to convey. it happens on November 5th. “There is no single answer that will solve all of our future problems,” Butler said. “There is no magic bullet. Instead, there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

This election was never going to save us, so I have to believe it will never doom us either. This, perhaps, is a measure of my own delusion – I can’t bring myself to wake up every morning thinking it’s all a wash. But governments and institutions and gerrymandered districts are not heroes. Harris was not a savior, she was always a substitute for something – someone – better. During the first Trump administration, we were tasked with taking care of each other in any way we could. We would have been charged with the same duty under Harris, though perhaps in fewer ways. Maybe my chest wouldn’t feel so heavy. Maybe I wouldn’t feel as angry as I do. But it was just us: sending money to UNRWA, driving a friend across state lines to get an abortion, following the trans teenager who lives in your building to make sure he gets home when he walks around late at night.

I still wanted Harris to win. I wanted it for my mom who was hoping for a brown and black president even though she doesn’t even live here. I wanted a sign that it could get better. But I can’t completely give up hope, even though this year’s results tell me maybe I should. I refuse to feel stupid in my longing for more humanity. I cannot allow myself to sink too deep into my despair; there are simply too many of us to save.

Hope doesn’t have to come wholesale. You can pick and choose and take what you can get—in fact, right now you should, because it’s the only thing that keeps our hearts from atrophying. Even in the rubble, light shines through. Sarah McBride won her race for Congress, making her the first openly trans member of Congress. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who pursued charges against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election, won her re-election bid. Mark “I’m a Black Nazi” Robinson has lost his race for governor of North Carolina. As of this writing, all but two states with abortion amendments on the ballot have voted to protect abortion rights. Florida’s Monique Worrell, ousted from her state’s attorney job by Ron DeSantis, won her back seat. For the first time (yes, ever, gloomy), there will be two black women in the Senate.

I have to look for hope, like a pig looking for truffles, like a dog trying to find a bone it can’t remember where it buried. I will dig it till I die.

For now, as we wait for Inauguration Day, all we have to do is rest for a moment. Not for too long—there’s a lot more work on the other side of tomorrow, and the day after that, and the week after that, and the year after that, forever, for the rest of time, until you die, and probably even after that . You can still be an answer to a future problem. But now is the time for grief: grief for who we will surely lose in the next four years, and grief for the last strands of democratic innocence we have left. You will never find a lack of policies or laws or social mores that call for desperate and immediate improvements, for yourself or others. Despair will soon wrap around you again as we all begin to realize what will be four more brutal years of Trump politics. Today is for suffering.

But tomorrow—tomorrow is for the community. I’ll be there, chest heaving, limbs heavy, eyes bleary, waiting you.