Four years ago

An election, getting back together, and fear

I am distracted and working, so this piece isn’t very well written. I don’t care! - Alex

Just about four years ago, it was becoming clear that Hillary Clinton was losing the election. On a day when most expected the former Secretary of State and Senator to win the 2016 plebiscite, Donald Trump was pulling ahead.

It was a confusing moment, given how the race had largely looked during the campaigns.

That world-inverting afternoon, however, had a seemingly-small but huge impact on my life, beyond how the election wound up being won or how I felt about its result: During the election confusion, Liza called me.

I was in Sunnyvale at the time, spending election day in a hammock in my sister’s backyard, preparing mentally to eat a huge plate of nachos once the results came in. (I spent a lot of time at my sister’s house in 2016, dropping by for a bunch of weekends after my mid-year rehab jaunt.)

As the votes piled up, and the tallies looked increasingly poor for the Democratic candidate, Liza rang.

At the time we had just gotten back into touch, agreeing to only speak once each month. My goal was to avoid falling in love with her again, so keeping the communication low after our multi-year comms break felt intelligent.

But, Liza, surprised at the election results that were starting to look worse, called outside of our agree-upon cadence because she knew I spent too much time on Twitter, and thus might know what was going on.

I answered, of course, and that call changed my life. We never really stopped talking. After Election Day, 2016, we’ve spoken every day since. We got back together a month later, got engaged a year later, got married two and a half years later.

That early November day was bad for the country, but it was amazingly good for me, pushing Liza and I back into each other’s lives because we didn’t want to spend it apart. And then we didn’t want to spend any other days apart.

Here’s to this election going a bit differently, though. Hugs.