Ghost hunting on the failed 50th anniversary of Roe

I was watching the crowd: The girl in the sparkly white hat sitting on her father’s shoulders; the brothers chasing each other around a marble column; the priest in the rainbow stole; and me, haunted, feeling fingers brush against the back of my neck.

I’d felt time shift around me the moment I came out of the hallway and the ceiling opened up. I think it was the banners hanging on balcony of the rotunda. I guess I haven’t been at a rally inside the Capitol since Act 10. Since I was 17. Since everything felt possible.

Sometimes I think 2011 was the last good year. A dictator was falling in Cairo. Occupy was sparking. I was in Madison, singing with my teachers.

Lately, I’ve been reading about forests and thinking about death. About how things nourish far beyond their own lives. About how timescales stretch and pull like taffy ’til they’re twisted back at our feet.

I told my friends that I thought Wisconsin never recovered from losing back then. I meant progressives. But I suppose I really just meant me.

I think a version of myself haunts the Capitol. She’s mad at me. I don’t know how to be messy in belief anymore. I don’t know how to fight.

On Sunday, I stood in the middle of a rally for a very real and current reason. I don’t have control over my body in this state. An election on April 4 could change that. It could change a lot of things that have made this place less safe for me and the people I love. My trans friend who needs healthcare. My friend trying to get pregnant. The rosy-cheeked two year old who deserves to know winter.

The state that exists today was designed to make our lives worse. We saw the architects for who they were day one. We tried to stop it. We failed. And now we have another chance, but I was so far in my head I couldn’t even hear the voice blaring through the megaphone.

On the prairie, before communing with ghosts, I saw a dead thing. Fresh blood against the snow, a squiggle of intestine, and some hair. I thought it was beautiful. I’m a scavenger these days. Feeding on the blood of past belief.

And it was really something, you know. To be 17 and cell in a body of people breathing and singing and dancing. We believed so much that we were right and that what was right would win. We were so young.

I was in North Carolina by the time all the breath got sucked out in a failed recall election. To be burnt out at 20, what a privilege. A privilege I’ve been trying to scrape off of my skin ever since.

I’m aware this whole thing is a case study in Madison whiteness. We lost, we fell apart. I lost, I fell apart. Now Saturn is returning, or something. And I wasted one of three decades with my hands in the air.

When I looked around the rotunda, everything was a memory except the faces. Everyone I was 17 and hopeful with has left. Gone to places that don’t hate them quite so much as this one does. Perhaps that’s why the ghosts remain. To remind us of when we were together, and to ask why we are no longer.

I don’t have the answer. The crowds have never been that size since. Not for the Women’s March, or Black Lives Matter, or the Youth Climate March. Maybe the answer is that so many of us are zombies who left our hearts in 2011.

If I could do it all over I would. I would stand there in the snow and I would shout and I would sing. But this time, I would find someone who’d been there before. Someone to say: This might take a decade, and we need you for all of it.

I kept trying to shake off the cobwebs by reminding myself that there were faces I recognized standing right next to me. People choosing to be here. People I’m building my own new world with.

This might take a decade. And we need you for all of it.