22 Oct 2024

All Curled Up

by Ana Marie Cox

How does one know when one is done lying on the floor in the fetal position?

I had just gotten off a call with a friend who is a reporter for a large mainstream news organization. Our conversation had been serious but, you know, wonky. “How’s she polling here, is X type of voter being represented in the cross-tabs, what about the Taylor Swift effect,” etc. Then as we were wrapping up and agreeing that it was impossible to predict who would win, this: “I’m prepared. My kids have passports and I’ve talked to a Canadian immigration lawyer.”

Look, that wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone remark on a possible escape plan if the wrong guy becomes president. Literally it wasn’t even the first time that day. But if every left-leaning person in the past twenty years who threatened to leave the country if the Republicans won actually left, this election would a lot be less close than it’s going to be. My friend’s revelation laid me low because my friend is not particularly left-leaning; my friend is just a person who has been covering politics for half a lifetime and was admitting to never having been this scared before.

I got off the call and melted down onto my dog’s bed. Then, perhaps before I was ready, I had another meeting to go to. I could bike to it, so I did.

My neighborhood in South Austin had been lurching ungracefully toward gentrification when interest rates exploded, halting that journey in mid-stride; my house is one of a handful of studiously tasteful flips, situated amid somewhat shabby rentals and colorful houses with elaborate yard art whose owners have just about finished paying off their mortgages. There’s a few Trump signs, and a lot more Harris signs, including homemade homages (one house has a painted sheet hanging off the porch); there are Halloween inflatables and lots of large fake cobwebs sticking to brick walls. There are some For Sale signs, eroded by months of summer sun.