Rolling Boulders Up Hills and Other Election Metaphors
It was an outing to the supermarket because we ran out of coffee and … something else?
But we hadn’t ever been to this store before. I wasn’t planning on joining, but we decided to make a family trip of it. Biba, Andrew, Brody and I piled into the CRV my parents bought in Peoria, Illinois in 2008.
The last memory of our family living together under one roof, all together in one home. It was a great house, with a big yard and our grandparents visited a few times and we had lovely neighbors and a trampoline and a chiminea and a big grill to host saudades-filled brasilian barbecues. But Peoria hurts. It hurt me in a way I am only just beginning to reckon with.
I don’t usually drive around in the CRV reliving formative moments in Peoria Illinois, but today, in the back seat, on a family outing, it sure felt that way. We were heading east on 6 out of Golden, Colorado. As we pulled up to the light to turn left onto Colfax, SUVs and trucks of all sizes and colors lined up at the light. Trump/Pence flags adorning shiny lifted exteriors. Flags big enough to be read from the top of South Table Mountain. Bastardized American flags with blue stripes, for ‘blue lives.’ They waved violently, forceful. A fearless hail to a fourth reich.
I was suddenly incredibly and irreversibly overcome.
I felt the contents of my stomach bubble up into my throat, teasing the back of my mouth with remnants of a now sour lunch. A visceral reaction many would call an exaggeration. But my body physically responded to a site I am grateful I have not had to witness in the eight months I’ve been in the USA, the first stay longer than a week or two in six years.
In the back seat, I rolled down the window hoping the cold air would drown me and push my lunch as far deep as it could go. Long breaths and sweaty palms. At the next light, the Trump fleet littered the lane next to ours, the lot of them ass to face, flags towering in the fall sun, shadows cast wide across our car. My sister asked Andrew to drive up a bit so she could see what the driver looked like. Alone in her SUV was a blond woman maybe in her mid-30s or 40s. I didn’t look. I was still trying to breathe my body back into a semblance of calm. But the bubbling inside got louder, I was seconds away from lunging out the window hands on my knees, bent at my hips, hair blowing in the wind, lunch fertilizing the renegade grass on the shoulder of the road. But, deus ex machina, and the light turned green and we plowed forth.
When we got to the all-american strip mall that housed said supermarket I noticed a big mainstream bookstore next door. The type of bookstore I associate with the USA. It has a very specific smell of printed paper and drip coffee and all you can hear are ASMR voices and a soft pinging of checkout guns. Does anyone even shop at these anymore?
I walked in on autopilot and I decided I wanted to find a copy of David Chang’s new memoir, Eat a Peach (I had been reading a digital library copy). The book’s cover, a play on the tale as old as time: a Sisyphean exercise of continuously pushing a massive boulder to the top of a hill only to have it roll back down again. Much like every day (for most of us) since this pandemic began.
I had not been in a store like this since March. It was my first stop (after the consulate) when I landed in Chicago from Sao Paulo with a carry-on suitcase and the hope of being in Cape Town by early April. Today, eight months later, I walked into that familiar smell- a place where neatly stacked boardgames greet you in the space between the double-door entrance. A table of nonfiction titles welcomed me with arms wide open, Obama’s Substance of Hope, Ibram Kendi’s Be Anti-Racist, Winning the Green New Deal by the Sunrise Movement, and others.
Three women who worked at the store were huddled around the table reading from a cell-phone about how Trump supporters were blocking major highways with their vehicles. I lingered touching covers like the scene in Hook when the Lost Boys see Peter Pan as an adult for the first time. Mushing his face and asking if it’s really him. I so deeply missed this massive coven of the printed words of others. I was eavesdropping, they asked if I could be helped. Startled, I choked. I mumbled that I haven’t been in one of these since March… “I’m just looking, thank you.” But really, I wanted to thank them for the comfort their collective outrage and well-stocked welcome table brought me. I wanted to thank them for keeping my lunch where it was meant to be.
They carried on with more important things and I slowly wandered away realizing my eyes were filled with tears. Embarrassed, I walked towards the back of the store looking for the autobiography section. But before I found my peach, I found a wall of books on display, several shelves high — tall and proud. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, Becoming by Michelle Obama, Ta-Nehisi Coats’ Between the World and Me, Ijeoma Oluo’s So you Want to Talk About Race, Born a Crime by Trevor Noah. Some of my favorites, some titles that are on my list. After a careful study, I shuffled into the young adult fiction section and was welcomed by Black and Brown faces, copies of Elizabeth Acevedo’s incredible books felt like home. I have been loving on them for years with pride and admiration. That is when I saw David and his Sisyphean peach. I picked the book off the shelf like I had just found something I lost that I never thought I’d see again.
Holding my treasure, I stood in awe. Comforted by all these Black and Brown and Asian and Indigenous faces and names and figures. I suddenly found myself wanting to make a little bed at the foot of this shelf, an alter at this church. Safe on this side. On the inside. My heavy winter boots suddenly laden with concrete, unwilling to leave in fear of what’s outside. In fear of who’s outside.
I am afraid of what this country is and what it continues to become. We are not leaving these first four years unscathed- we will be undoing this trauma for generations. But I don’t think we would leave another four years with our lives.
Some say we must tear the whole thing down and rebuild, let it burn to ash first. It’s been torn down. This is rock bottom. And if you want to break the bones in your hands and rip the skin off your fingers by digging out those rocks and drowning in the shallows beneath, what words can be offered to tell you it’s not worth it? But for me, for millions of us, this is enough. This is as far as we are willing to fall before picking ourselves up — together.
I left this country six years ago with no intention of ever coming back, but 2020 works in mysterious ways. And somehow it has managed to make it back into the cracks of my broken heart. I’m not saying I’m staying, but I am saying I will continue to work — with my words, my art, my sadness. A Luta Continua. Because on Wednesday the rebuilding begins. And it will take all of us.
