Eyes burn. It’s the first taste of tea that brings me around – foreign to this subject.
Red, blue and red again. This patchwork map flashes before my eyes, just as it has done for the past four hours. Should this be the early mid-week routine? No, but this is reality and I continue to beg for the people of the mid-west to change their minds and silently praise the sunshine coast.
Perhaps this a subject that should remain distant to me – should I care to be up in the early hours, refreshing the app and using mental arithmetic to understand the values that are depleting and arising across the pond.
We aren’t any better.
Never has arithmetic been my morning go-to, but instead it has become a mindless plea for sanctity. Red, blue and blue again. Perhaps there is some left.
As my eyes water. Blue, red and red again – my eyelids feel like the mindless geography that I have so easily consumed.
Phones buzz. Rooms light up with the stark blue light that has kept me awake all night – let’s hope that it is blue that keeps me awake tomorrow.
And then I cried.
At the joy of New Yorkers drilling their car horns, in a completely different way to when I stepped foot in the city earlier this year. At the crowds in Washington that shower streets with exuberance.
News channels felt like home over the past eight months – specifically a holiday home in the last four days.
Face wet, butterflies in my stomach and arms full of goosebumps.
America turned blue, and no longer were my sorrows.
Photography by Hannah Louise Lloyd
