20/365, Well fuckety, fuck, Donald Trump is king.

Again, again

I don’t know, can you let the inauguration go without acknowledging the inauguration? Not 16 years ago, I couldn’t, today I’m just fine with hiding. I bought all the papers that day and the next. I have some of them still, house moves and break ups and fits of over enthusiastic clear outs whittling them down over the years. I like to think I bought them because it was history in the making and it felt like the sort of thing you do with history, there was optimism in the air. Around about the same time I bought a new bed and wardrobes alone, spent weekends alone thrifting vintage furniture, went to art galleries alone and bought art alone, sat at matinees alone with black coffee and some arthouse film I didn’t know how to read. I have italicised the alone here because it was the key, the source of optimism and terror, which is pleasure really. Maybe Obama epitomised the way I was feeling on a personal level and everyone loves a reflective surface, but it really felt like there was something in the air that crisp morning following the inauguration when I made my way to Tesco for the papers, stopping to talk to the Big Issue seller, the only person I knew in the city then. Sometimes I look at life now and wonder where it all came from, not me surely, some kind of grand accident or joke.

The papers probably had a lot to do with the fact I fancied Obama, we all did, before the drones, the assassinations, the spin. That video of him dunking hoops, it’s what I do, rarely, if ever, has any president been so hot. Good for votes.

A couple of hours before the ceremony streamed from Washington, I bundled my kid into the car, drove to a retail park to buy myself my first laptop. Until then, I’d always used my husband’s and then when that wasn’t an option, I bought a bad desktop but it took 14 hours to load, and with the alimony, the aloneness, I felt rich. The whole day, a special sort of intoxication. Strange at 28 to experience a freedom I never had before. Later, we sat in the sitting room as the sky fell dark, curtains open still to that Scottish twilight blue that nowhere else ever deals up, watching him take the stand. My kid danced around me singing Obama is King, Obama is king, in the same way she had when we sat up all night as the results came in.

Over the coming months, I redrafted the first manuscript I ever wrote to length on that laptop. A manuscript I returned to last year, enough distance having passed, to extract the germ of an idea from. A manuscript I am meant to be finishing, and was failing to finish until today and suddenly, somehow, a rare day where writing feels like flying, the brakes are off, and you have the ability to be as emotionally honest as you need to be to write something half way worthwhile.

A year before Obama’s election, a friend told me everything I had was a lot to lose. To me, it all felt like small change: my marriage, my house, the perfect habitat furniture, the Castelli chairs we’d shipped back from Amsterdam, the bed linen so good I never kept it for best, the Eames EA117 office chair, the giant painting hanging over the fireplace, all of it - apart from the chairs, I still miss them - pennies.

But the aftermath, the freedom and the late nights at my laptop terrifying myself with what I wrote, filters through with an emotional intensity I’d never felt before because for a very long time feeling wasn’t an option. Now, I miss those days, even the nights crying and the acute sense of fear that dogged me for years, other things replaced them and there have been many good things since and how is any of it sixteen years ago, but the feeling in the air then, how raw it all was, how coloured in every new experience felt, when it was possible to believe the future might be better, that’s a lot to lose. There is a line in the new Lucy Dacus song where she sings how lucky are we to have so much to lose, I have been thinking of it a lot the past couple of days, and I think of it now, how lucky we were with our optimism and our naivety; how lucky I am, with everything to play for again.

(Apologies to Nick Laird for the title and my sheer audacity of nearly stealing a line from unarguably one of the best poems of the century, Up Late, and although I love a bold claim, that’s not one)