Small Life, Slow Life: 44/100 {The thing I need to talk about that I don’t know how to talk about.}

There are a lot of things I could talk about for this one.

I could talk about how forty-four is my favorite number, and it’s because of a silly reason. In third grade, doing math homework, a small earthquake shook our kitchen when I was doing problem number twenty-two. I immediately decided that twenty-two was my bad luck number; and thus, doubling that number would cancel out the bad luck and become my good luck number. (Don’t fault me guys, this is like, eight year-old logic we’re talking about.)

I planned to talk about the view from the top of the parking lot structure where I park at work. How it is just-so situated in the center of the town where we live, and gives this incredible 360-view of mountains all around, that in all my life growing up here, I never noticed.

I could talk about how I feel like I had a setback at work, and how the timeline of what I thought I wanted just gets pushed back and back and back. And how I feel like my life is whispering to me, Just decide what you want already. Stop waiting for the net to appear before you leap.

But what I really need to talk about is this Kavanaugh thing. Except that I don’t even know what to say.

A preliminary vote showed 51/49.

I sat with my little voter’s booklet last night, going through every proposition, every person running. Reading everything, deciding. I’m embarrassed to say that at 36 years-old, I’d never done that before. I voted, sometimes. If it was an “important” vote.

I never “cared” about politics, before.

(I never had to, because my rights were never at risk.)

I know, I know, you’re getting this all over the internet. It’s incessant, isn’t it? Here I am, just another text box spouting off about it.

Last week an older man sat next to me. I was eating lunch by myself, reading a book. Kavanaugh was plastered all over the screens above.

“I watch the news all day,” he said, “and then my wife gets home and wants to watch it too. But by that point I can’t watch it anymore, I’m too exhausted.”

“I hear you,” I said.

“What is happening to our country?” he asked me.

“I wish I knew,” was all I could say.

“These are dark days,” he said.

And they are.

What about my daughter? I want to ask these people making decisions for the rest of us.

What if someone held his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream?

She doesn’t look white. She is brown. Her last name is Middle Eastern. Will you think of her as “other,” too?

What will she do at the end of the century when our planet is, on average, seven degrees hotter?

What animals will she never see because we’re peeling back all of the provisions that protect them?

What future is even available to her?

I want to talk about all of this, but I don’t know what to say.