We are bricks: a post-election prayer.

Because today is a hard day for me, for my friends, for my family, for my communities, and for communities I work to be in coalition with, I wanted to share a few thoughts/wishes/prayers/cries to the Gods for us to maybe gather around and comfort each other.

I love you. I love who you are and what you bring to the world. This moment feels very cold and isolating and deeply unloving, but I want you to know that from my pinprick point on the map of the world, I am loving you. It feels like the only thing I can control right now. I love you, and I see you, and I value all the things you are.

We are not alone. Yeah, we have each other, you and me. But there are many other people feeling what we’re feeling right now, and while it’s impossible to feel their proximity and their solidarity all the time, they’re out there. They’re in the world, just as we are, and as long as we remember (always remember!) that no matter how dark things are, we can always ask for those others to lend love and care and support and presence. We can always ask for others to remind us we’re not alone. So ask, if you’re unsure. And when you are asked, show up. Our people desperately need us to live lives that remind us we live in numbers, not alone.

We have a history, and we are history. Queer people have faced a world like this one for as long as queer people have walked the planet. Queer people have lived, felt joy, resisted, showed defiance, been hurt, healed, survived, thrived, and have done the work of constructing space to live and breathe and be even before they were understood, in any way, to be queer. Yes, this is a singular moment in some ways, but in others, this moment is a moment like many others we’ve faced as queer people. We have a history, and that history is an armor. That history is a guidebook. It’s a sword to fight with and a soft pillow to rest our heads on. And we are history. Right now, in this moment. We are going to make the history that survives and undoes this nightmare. We will be what our elders are to us. We will be what tomorrow needs. Don’t forget that.

When I was in college, the Tony Kushner essay collection Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness was always nearby, in part for this quote from one of the pieces inside it:

“The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.”

You (whoever you are, reading this right now) and I are forming that indivisible human unit. The two of us. From us, everything else is possible, right?

I like to think that as you read to the end of this, you and I have formed that indivisible human unit, and the shape our unit takes is the shape of a brick. A brick is simple, but powerful. It can build: houses, towers, streets, cities. You can also hurl it through a window and start a revolution. And in the best of worlds, a single brick does both.

You and I, we can be that brick. We can show others how to form bricks of their own. We can all come together, all the fabulous bricks made of two connected human souls joined by the joy/pain of the present moment, and we can build something new. Smash a few windows.

And get through. We will get through.

Bricks last. We will last.

I love you. I’m glad you’re here.