A Vote, a Name

There's a huge weight of anxiousness racking the brain waves right now. It's been hovering and making the conversation failed. Now add on top.... outside there's a catastrophe - of an entire nation waiting in suspense. Opposing sides. Nothing left but to wait, for the future of the next four years. For the invisible future of ballots cast or un-cast. 

For change. 

But what are we voting on? What do we cling to in the last minutes before midnight?

Sometimes it feels like a machine of jittery results. A camera flash. A shaking-head motion that doesn't provide any more answers than a tease. 

In the end we reach for answers, for rationalizations, for soothing thoughts. Ache to feel satisfied.

But we reach. Putting trust, faith, and even our hearts in the hands of people we may never completely know (or even meet). 

It happens a thousand times in a lifetime. 

We vote not just for lying politicians, but for lies, love, and humanity.

"Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!" -John Proctor, in the Crucible

And maybe that's all that survives...a name. 

Maybe that's what we vote for -  the name itself. 

Or do we pick, jittery, in the hopes of what the name could posses to our lives? 

It's the name that survives. The name backs itself.

Then, terrifyingly a reputation could prove infinitely weighty. It could destroy and save, just as the soul does, the art does, and the soft touch does. 

I wake to my own name.

But in the last minutes before midnight - does any of it matter beside the feeling you're left with? 

Does any of the facts really matter if you're left feeling teased and deceived, confused and baffled, stressed and pressed, or most rarely; adventurous, blissful, and understood? 

It's a risk worth taking. It's a reach must extended. 

There's always a winner, a loser, and the one who didn't vote at all. 

Tomorrow we'll have the results...but not the answers.

Daily headphones: Katy Perry's "Hot n Cold", and Metro Station's "Shake it" (love that they joined the party this weekend) for hyper-relief. And New Amsterdam's classic winter-approaching song "Hanging on for Hope".