Burn it all down

It's difficult to feel anything but despair when you wake up to a yellow sky and a haze that settles across the neighborhood. For days, smoke obscured the mountains, the view of the water.

The rain came today, just as Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. I cannot stop crying.

When I don't know what else to do, whenever I can't breathe with rage or anxiety or grief, I write something somewhere. Sometimes it's on paper and it's barely coherent. Sometimes it's here and it's barely coherent.

What is the word for this grief? This rage? This despair?

I opened up the sliding doors in our dining room to hear the rain sounding on the patio, the roof. 

A crack of thunder.

The collective hearts of people who prayed she would outlast the monster, breaking.

And whose hearts aren't? I want to know. I truly want to know. I suspect it's the same folks who think they're pro-life but who voted this misogynistic rapist white supremacist monster into office, who recite religious platitudes like they have anything to do with understanding Christ, who are comfortable in their complacency because they won't stand up for the basic human rights of anyone who isn't a fetus inside a woman who can be controlled, and we all know the fetus is utterly beside the point, because if the goal were ever lowering the rates of abortion we wouldn't have voted this monster into office. 

I'm writing and crying and thunder is shaking my house.

I'm fucking over it. I remember crying in my kitchen late that night nearly four years ago, sobbing into Matt's chest. I remember the numbness, the horror. It has not diminished. My rage and fear swell beyond the capacity of my heart and lungs to contain them and I don't know what to do with that except try to write about it. 

The rain is coming down in a solid sheet of water outside my open door. I don't remember when we last saw rain like this. This is the force of our grief. 

I want to know. I want to know whose hearts aren't breaking, because I don't want those folks to have access to mine. 

The only sound loud enough to break through the rain is the thunder. The only light sharp enough to break through the smoke is the lightning. I hope she burns it all down.