The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
I heard it everywhere in the last two days. Just need a result. Said the way you say just need a quiet night in or just need to get through the week. Said the way people speak when they have decided in advance not to feel the full weight of the thing they are describing.
That word — just — is doing so much work. It is a load-bearing word. It is the word you reach for when the alternative is standing in the open with nothing between you and the size of what is coming.
This is what I know about collective self-protection: it begins in language. Before the heart closes down, the mouth does. The nation says just and the nation breathes a little easier and the nation does not ask itself what it is actually asking for. A result. Against them. In Miami. Under those lights. With this history pressed against the back of every knee.
The hope is real. I want to be clear about that. I feel it and I think it is clean and I am not here to take it from anyone.
But the shelter won't hold. It was never built to hold — only to let us sleep the nights between.
What's coming will arrive in its full dimensions. It always does. The word just will not be there when it comes. Only the thing itself, standing in the doorway, exactly as large as it always was.