My six-year-old son is afraid of his own room. The office I kind of get. It’s cluttered, a mom zone. He needs to walk past both to get to the bathroom, broad daylight won’t do it unless their doors are closed or their lights are on so he can verify safety.
He sleeps with a glowing Super Mario star that illuminates half his room. The space between the bottom of his bed and the floor is barricaded with the giant foam blocks he likes to Ninja Warrior with, the gaps smooshed with stuffies, blockading whatever might lurk beneath. He needs his covers a certain way. We both tuck him in and sing his song, then trade turns each night staying in his room until he falls asleep.
I assure him of his welfare and take care not to minimize his experience. If I can’t enter his world at his most vulnerable now, why would he want me in it when the monsters are really real?
I ask him what is it like when he’s alone in bed, dead of night, “What do you see?”
Beasts with sharp teeth?
A zillion eyes, squidgy tentacles, clacky claws, faces fallen off?
He gestures vaguely.
“The darkness stacks up.”
Archaic fear scales my spine damn do you remember what that was like? Your eyeballs doing childish, ancient things, catching out predators, no matter it’s all false alarms, your imagination at its meanest—piles of clothes into blackholes and subtle shifting shadow, slithering at the periphery.
I fell sick on New Year’s Eve, two weeks plus only now feeling better, though if my head changes cant I need to clamp the crown to hold in the pressure. Walking about with palms pressed to my skull, a perpetual state of disbelief. I got the shot but it was probably still the flu. Twelves boxes of tissues, soaked with neon gunk and blood. Coughs so long and deep I puked.
It’s thrown a wrench in my 2026. I’m the sort of person who reflects, more cynical these days than I like to admit, but still game for the annual ritual reset, a gullible goldfish. There shall be goals! Bullet points! Plans! This year’s gonna be different.
“That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you,” BAM BAM BAM!
I learned of it first from my brother in St. Paul, vague texting the family thread about a punchy mayoral response. He later apologized for messaging without context, because ope, no, I hadn’t heard. A woman had been murdered. I was at work, battling through the crud and brain fog, dutifully ignoring the world, the worst.
These fucking assholes. These absolute fucking actual monsters, reigned by a criminal rapist pedophile tyrant, fueled by lies, hate, greed, self-convinced invincibility, riding the high of a righteousness that reeks, a gloves-off god complex that kills on behalf of the United States government.
2026.
There will be gaols.
Bullet wounds.
Plans, oh yes, master ones.
Project Twenty Twenty-the-Rest-of-Our-Lives.
There’s no quick, under the covers set-just-right from this never-ending coverup, this coup of the soul of the country I thought I grew up with (yup, still waking up, still the goldfish) but really, sure—The Files—they’ll redact deny attack blackbox fantasy island child rape as long as possible, but everything else? They’re not even hiding.
L.A. Chicago. Minneapolis.
Gaza. Venezuela. Greenland.
When they tell you who they are, believe them.
I got no rightsiding this. Happy path through outrage and grief. Living in Texas is an abstraction, another dimension, “my Minneapolis” another lifetime, those city streets I used to bike now filled with teargas and chants (again) of a citizenry that persists, resists, trauma after trauma after trauma. I am so damn proud of them, and so damn scared. I think of my family and friends in the Cities nonstop.
Along with this other six-year-old son who doesn’t have his mom to save him from these monsters.
This is not a false alarm.
Believe what your eyes are showing you.
The darkness stacks up.
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