Up front, this isn’t meant to “be helpful” or “of value.” I struggled through about a dozen attempts at “creating value” this week and can’t manage it. I don’t really know what this is. It might just be noise, or it might be thoughts you recognize within yourself. All I have to give right now is being human in front of other humans. —A

I should be writing. I should be marketing. I should be using my art to protest. But instead, I am stuck in a never-ending loop of rumination and rage. Of calling senators, of donating, of staring at the wall. Of reading bell hooks and Audre Lorde, of digging out Chela Sandoval and hugging Methodologies to my chest and hoping that the words I’ve highlighted over and over might bring me hope.

And I am unfocused as the horrors descend faster than any one person can process, worrying about whether or not the cat might have cancer. Worrying that my husband might still have cancer. Wondering how my career, which seemed like such a bright light in my life two years ago now feels like an endless freefall of irrelevance and doom. Wondering if it’s the hormones. It’s probably the hormones, which are making the ADHD worse. And I’m definitely depressed. Yes, I’m depressed.

The dark days are here. Will they ever leave? That Polish influencer talked about what it feels like to have Slavic ancestry and to always know that things can get worse. That winter can get darker, that oppression can get scarier. My Welsh bones agreed with the Polish influencer. My Czech bones agreed as well, and made a snide comment in return.

I wonder if magic might help. But can I even do magic anymore? Have I ever been able to affect a single thing with the power of my mind? Once upon a time I thought that my words were magic and then the influencers all said that books were just “brain off” time. But my brain doesn’t turn off. My brain wracks through mystics, and activists, and surrealists, and philosophers, and comic, and films, and things I made up wholly on my own—all the time, everything all at once.

The dark days are here. They are here and they are threatening never to leave, under the too-bright smiles of thin, cishet white women, who call it a slur to be called “cis” or “heterosexual”—both of which they will insist you agree that they are, but in their own words. The right words. Only the right words for the right. And the left wants the right words too.

Does the left know how far right they’ve gone? Do they know where the tools they’re using came from? Did they drink the tequila left on the porch? Did they see Practical Magic—do they know how easy it is to think you’re doing the right thing, only to resurrect the evil you tried to kill in the first place. This time it’s inside the house. The call is coming from inside the house, and soon we will all be in the dark.

Sun shines on Minnesota, but the dark descends all the same. Falling around us. Seeping into my bones. Keeping me still, and never, ever, ever safe.

But then Annie calls, and we cackle, our laughter ringing into the frigid winter nights. The vet calls and says it’s probably not cancer—the cat might need new food. V gets home from vacation. My period is almost over. The artists email back and say, it’s okay, we understand, we love you, let us know if we can help.

No one can help now. It’s probably over. Or maybe I can stage a comeback. Let’s face it, kid, you’re not the comeback kind. Stay down. Stay down. Stay down.

I feel better. I feel worse. These are the dark days and things can always, always get worse. And this was meant to break us, but the most breakable of us have already been broken a thousand times over and we are still here. Maybe it is time for this to break. Maybe that is the only way. I draw the Tower so many times, my fingers know where it sits in every deck. This must break, and so too must we, I fear.

And these are the dark days. These are the dark days, but all life grows in darkness, and spring always comes again. I don’t know when it will come for us, or if it ever will. But the phone will ring, and you will laugh into the night, and the fireflies will glow in the garden this June, and there will be horrors—endless horrors—and somehow, somehow, somehow, I have to believe that enough of us will make it to the other side of this.

I have to believe that there will be another side. That there will be another way. That one day I will wake up and the words will flow out of me with bravery again. Or that I will wake up and know for certain that it is simply time to stop, but it will be decided.

These are the dark days, and I no longer know what to say.