Tears on my face.

Friends’ facebook statuses.  (the protest posterboards of today).

This is the first time I’ve ever cared about something so fiercely that’s not immediately related to my own life, my own corporeal being.

I told Ryan on the phone tonight, my brain has no preconceived module for this kind of emotion.   I keep thinking, “This is how I felt when Yale beat Harvard in football my freshman year!”  That is literally the closest I can get to understanding my current exhilaration.

I’ve never been a “I’m moving to Canada” type person.  I’ve always known that I would disagree with much of this country, or at least much of this country’s electorate.  I’m wired to tend towards socialism (not that I believe that system could ever be viable in this country in this day and age.)  But now I am excited to represent America.  I feel, in my own unique idiom, how staunch conservatives must have felt eight years ago: elation, joy, hope.  I don’t believe that God ordained Barack Obama to be president; I believe I helped make him that, and that means infinitely more to me than anything else.

I don’t have any interest in gloating.  Look, country!  We have a lot of work to do!  Obama is not the Messiah, he is not the answer to all our problems, but he is a start, a real real real real real start.  I lent my faith to the Democratic party this year, writing my name into their party ranks, believing that they could rise above their rigid barriers.  Democratic Party, you do not operate outside of your ordinary constituents.  WE are your engine, WE made you who you are today, we of hope, tempered by pragmatism, but circularly informed by hope.

I am so lucky to have experienced today, and I wish my sister could have been here to see it too (this is her first presidential election, and she lives in France.)  On my first Presidential election, I was so excited to be an active part of the electoral process, and in return, I learned how little my vote (the popular vote) mattered.  This is not redemption, this is not comeuppance.  This is balance, this is the yang to eight years’ tragic yin.  Remember the image of the 1984 electoral map — Mondale, the closest thing we’ve seen to Obama, running 25 years too early, carrying only his home state and D.C. — how our parents laughed at it, went to bed early, never gave him a second look, is the really the best the Democratic Party could do?  Obama’s victory tonight is not a victory for the Democratic party, not really.  It is a sign that the two-party system is changing, that our political communities and borders are not only imagined but ultimately detrimental, without the elevation of our very souls’ desires — hope, love, change we need.

Obama has been our muse.  It’s our duty now not to deify him, but to hold him to every promise he has bestowed upon us.  I cried tonight not because I feel we had been saved, but because someone like me is in the White House – ambitious, outspoken, complex, nuanced, difficult, torn.  I love this country so much that I literally do not have the words to express it.  Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for proving me wrong.