Three Women on Trump: Grief

By Shelby Yaffe

 

I.

My last text to Maggie before the apocalypse began read, “Are you bringing that joint tonight?”

Maggie’s last text to me before the apocalypse began read, “And a canister of 10mg gummies. We need to be fucked up for this.”

Election Day, 2016, and we were ready for this shit to be over. We were ready to start hearing Madame President all over the TV and the radio, to see it on the front of every magazine. We were ready to raise the vibration of every western woman’s ovaries. We were certain that even our menstrual cramps would be more bearable if the leader of the fucking free world had also experienced menstrual cramps at one time in her life! Glass ceilings were about to be broken and we were so goddamn grateful that we already knew that there was simply no way that she could lose.

II.
When it began to appear that she was losing . . . we did not panic. We took deep breaths. I pulled ancient shamanic energy from my root chakra and shot that shit across the country, right to where Hillary Clinton was sitting, so that she would be surrounded with my spiritual warrior cry of “WE’RE STILL GONNA WIN THIS SHIT, DON’T GIVE UP YET!”

I was deeply, profoundly stoned. Maggie and I had a spread of munchies. We munched quietly.

LITTLE DID WE EVEN KNOW.

III.
When I was twelve, I got my first real crush. The kind of crush that makes you tingle in places you didn’t know really existed before you were twelve or so.

The problem was, my crush was a girl. And I knew that was wrong. Something must have been wrong with me, I thought. I prayed for God to make the feelings go away.

“Conversion therapy should absolutely be an option for anyone struggling with homosexual thoughts,” Mike Pence once said.

IV.
Ten p.m. Maggie was sitting on the kitchen floor, up against the refrigerator, with her head in her hands. I was pacing in the living room, frantically.

“This is not happening,” I said. “We’re just too high.
We’re hallucinating it.
Or we don’t actually understand what we’re reading.
We don’t get how the electoral college works.
We didn’t pay attention in American Government.
That class was a decade ago! We just don’t know what’s going on.
This is not happening.”

Maggie’s head remained in her hands.

“He’s not going to win,” I said. “It’s fine.
We’re overreacting.
He’s not going to win.”

V.
When I was seventeen, I went to college.

I was so excited to smoke cherry Prime Times without having to cover up the smell when I came home.

And I was so excited to turn my music all the way up.

And I was so excited to not have a curfew.

And I was so excited to learn, and to write, and to experience real life, because I was fucking seventeen, and that’s what you do when you’re seventeen.

And I had only been away from home two weeks when I was date raped.

And I was too scared to tell the cops the truth.

So I just told them he had touched me.

And they said there wasn’t much they could do.

“He touched me and I didn’t want him to,” I said.

They said they’d pull him out of class and give him a stern talking to.

And I didn’t even last another week at that college.

“Grab them by the pussy,” Trump says. “You can do anything you want.”

VI.
Eleven p.m. found me next to Maggie, with my head in my hands, weeping uncontrollably, mourning the death of the America I thought I lived in.

VII.
I have Mexican friends. And I have black friends. And I have Muslim friends. I have gay friends. I have friends with disabilities.

I am a woman. I am a survivor.

Don’t pretend for a second that this doesn’t affect all of us.

If a Trump presidency doesn’t hurt someone you love, then you don’t love enough people.

VIII.
Noon, the day after election day, found me decidedly and unapologetically making out with the woman I adore at the zoo. I didn’t care who saw me. I didn’t care about the collective dark cloud hanging over my country. I kissed her because I love the curve of her lips, because I love how when she talks, I feel like I’m safe, like the world is no longer caving in around me.

But even tangled up with her, nursing our wounds and wondering what comes next for us in this world, I felt like a truck ran over me. I felt exhausted.

This feels like being roofied all over again, waking up somewhere I am absolutely NOT supposed to be.

I DID NOT CONSENT TO THIS SHIT.

Donald J. Trump is not my president.

Do you hear me?

He is not my fucking president.

 

 

Shelby Yaffe is a flash fiction author, poet, dabbling songwriter, and Denver native. As a lover of the stage, she can frequently be found at local open mics, pretending like she isn’t scared out of her fucking mind to read in front of people again. Her first-ever flash piece, “Three Things I Never Did After That Summer,” was featured in Fast Forward Press’s anthology, Flash 101: Surviving the Flash Apocalypse. As a recently-out queer-identifying woman, she really hates Donald Trump, and will probably be writing about that hatred for at least the next four years.

 

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