I Am Not a Rhinoceros

I’m lying on the floor next to my husband and my dog. I’ve eaten. I took a long walk in the sun earlier. I have a phone call in thirty minutes. I’m telling you this because I want you to know I’m functional. Barely, but awake and functional.

The president is going to war with Iran. A country and a people who have done nothing to us. He is demanding they reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which they only closed because we attacked them.

In the coming months, food supply chains will buckle. The norms we built our lives around are collapsing at a speed that doesn’t allow for processing. And what feels utterly insane to me is that so many people are behaving as though this is normal.

There’s a play by Eugène Ionesco called Rhinocéros. Written in 1959. One by one, everyone in a small town transforms into a rhinoceros. Friends, colleagues, lovers. Each one finds a reason why it’s fine. Why it’s natural. Why, maybe, the rhinoceroses have a point. Until one man is left, the last human, wondering if he’s the crazy one for refusing to change.

Ionesco wasn’t writing about rhinoceroses. He was writing about watching his friends become fascists in Romania. All intelligent, reasonable people who just went along. And the horror of the play isn’t the ideology. It’s how normal it starts to feel for everyone except those who refuse.

I am not a rhinoceros. If you’re reading this and agree, I suspect you aren’t either.

What I am tho is exhausted. Not the kind that sleep can resolve. It’s the kind that settles into your body like weather. I feel a heavy weight on my skin and in my soul. Maddeningly so, my body has registered that the world has changed, but my mind hasn’t caught up to the full scope of it yet.

The truth is, I’ve felt this before. After my father and brother were murdered in 1997, I walked through months — no, years — like this. I knew in my bones that life would never be the same. I didn’t know in what ways. I couldn’t comprehend it all, let alone process it. I could only exist inside the heaviness, day to day, not knowing if it would ever lift.

That’s how this feels to me. Only today is different in one way. I’m not alone. I know that millions of people in this country and across the world are feeling what I’m feeling right now. That’s not good news. But it changes the shape of the despair. It means this isn’t mine alone to carry.

So many in our political class are the weakest, most pathetic, cowardly, and useless group of people to ever hold office. They will go down in history as having colluded with the most dangerous people to ever hold power. History is fascinating to study, but it is horrible to live through.

I’m on the floor. My dog is next to me. My husband is at his desk. In thirty minutes, I have a phone call.

That’s all I have right now. And that’s enough.