Early morning. Hours yet before there is light enough for me to see the full extent of damage to my car.

Returning home last night from work, after a stop at the grocery store (oh, if only I'd gone back for the bundle of kindling, which was the reason I'd stopped in the first place, but I was so tired.), eggs and wine and something to stir fry in a sack pressed snug against my laptop bag and the rinsed-out remains of my lunch. I'm traveling the speed limit. I note this for you, because the stretch of road that drops into my village from the hill overlooking two bays is a notorious speed trap. It's all too easy—when you're so close to home, when, in the daylight, you're distracted by the sunglints and sailboats on the water and the mountains beyond—to let the car cruise past thirty, flirt with forty.

But I am careful. I drive this stretch a dozen times a week, at least. I know just the right amount of pressure on the gas to keep the speedometer hovering at the limit.

On this night, last night, as I dip down into town, glowering headlights consume my rearview mirror. Dodge Ram crawls up my ass, past the diner, past the Safeway, through the intersection and all along the stretch that borders the shipyards. Must not be a local. I let it go, lost in my end of a long workday, rambling, footsore thoughts of dinner, copyedits. I ignore the menacing glare of light behind me; so close to home, one of us is bound to make a turn soon.

I'm certainly not thinking about getting sideswiped. I'm not prepared for the driver behind me to decide, suddenly, that he will take the same left turn I'm making, but that he'll make it first, and in trying to get ahead of me, he runs into me.

The driver tells me in the parking lot where we end up, two sets of hazard lights flashing, that he "got tired of waiting for me." The molding of my side mirror wobbles on the hood of my car, my hands shake as I search in my purse for my insurance card.

Awakened by anger in the wee, lonely hours. Dismayed. Hurt. In my mind's playback loop I keep hearing, "I got tired of waiting for you."

What happened to me last night feels like a metaphor for this long, bitter night of election season. We're all just so very tired of waiting for each other. And so we ram our own way forward, regardless of anyone else's safety or well-being. To hell with common sense or what is legal, moral or ethical. We've lost our compassion, our empathy, our sense of a greater good. We've lost our way.

I don't really know what to do now. I'm not of a mind to forgive. Not today. It's hard to muster the energy to be an activist, a writer, an engaged human being when merely driving down the road puts you at risk of someone else's thwarted sense of entitlement.

I'm too tired to do much else today but move forward. I have to leave for work again soon. I have to, like everyone else around me, pick up and continue, despite the anger, the despair, the bewilderment. I have to find hope.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
~ from Wait by Galway Kinnell (1927-2014)