One Week On

I have awakened from the nightmare. For the past five years my wakeful hours took place in nightmarish landscapes and events that were characterized by willful deceits, calumnies, incivilities, indecencies, criminalities, and by malicious attacks on basic human and inalienable rights. I carried this waking nightmare about with me daily and even the brightest sunlight could not dispel the darkness that the Trump administration and its cowardly sycophants had spread. Every morning I awoke to the horror that he was and that he had ruthlessly shaped, and there was no way to escape its assaults from which I and others suffered. Over the past five years I had written too often about my experience of Trump and what is now referred to as Trumpism, and sometimes the writing, though it expressed my anger always gave voice to a despair that the writing could never exorcise. I had no escape from the nightmare because it occurred into the days.
     I have now awakened from the nightmare of the Trump presidency, and the persons and images of which it was cruelly constructed have begun to somewhat dissipate. Now my breath began to return to its regular rhythms and my heartbeat returns to a more normal tempo. The heaviness I had carried over the past five years has someone attenuated, and despite the gray and wintry weather of the Midwest I feel somewhat lighter and warmer. But what has lingered all-too powerfully is the fear that gripped me in sleep in the midst of the nightmare. Though the manifest content of the nightmare has left, the nightmare continues to live in the feelings upon which it was constructed and which it generated. The nightmare doesn’t reside only in the frightening images of the dream or even in the whole narrative that composes it, but in the feelings that remain upon awakening. And so today, though he is gone and hopefully never coming back, I don’t yet feel safe or secure: the feelings I have suffered these past five years under his brutal reign continue to plague my days. As Joe Biden took the oath of office, it became true that Trump’s autocratic and anti-democratic reign of terror was over. I wept with relief. The joy that I experienced at the celebratory events that were the inaugural ceremony, the magnificence of the poem offered by Amanda Gorman, the virtual concert that celebrated the new era, and the incredible fireworks display that lit up the Washington skies, gave me hope. But in the morning the fear that the nightmare had bred remained and I was afraid.
     Still his sycophantic minions continue in promulgating deceit, subterfuge and calumnies that threaten my days and my nights. 

     There are nightmares that I have never forgotten, and I think this will be one of them.