In April, I lost something so central to my life that I’m still not even close to figuring out how I’m moving forward. I didn’t just lose my best friend, husband, and partner. I lost a good portion of our shared dreams. I lost the sense of security that comes with having a partner, not just financially but in all the other little ways. I lost my main source of comfort – there were nights I wasn’t able to sleep when just lying on Chris’s chest would help me fall asleep. Now I take medication for that, but today all I want is for him to be here, to tell me it’ll be okay.

When I sat down at my desk at work today I burst into tears, and continued to do so off and on all day. It’s not a usual occurrence anymore, but the thing about grief is that the littlest thing can just tear the wounds wide open again. And what happened last night is not just a little thing for this country. I’m a white woman with a college education and a job at a place that is probably going to do nothing but thrive for the foreseeable future. As long as I don’t get raped, the worst that is likely to happen is that I’ll spend the next however many years feeling completely helpless. That isn’t the case for all Americans.

I started out the primary season with a lot on my mind, having not thought much about it. My gut reaction was that while I technically agreed with Bernie Sanders, I thought Hillary Clinton would be able to accomplish more in Washington. That whole issue is enough for an entirely separate post. Still, I wasn’t thrilled with my chosen nominee. For a while, before really considering it, I was among the people who wished there were a better candidate out there but was settling on the one who just made the most sense to me.

Then I moved home, and ever-present MSNBC in the family room brought the election to the forefront. I started following 538 and listening to a growing number of political podcasts. I bought Hillary cups that were supposed to be constructed from 100% shattered glass ceiling. I waited in line (unsuccessfully) to see her, sharing stories and bonding with the people around me. I began to get excited.

Suddenly I wasn’t just voting for a candidate whose time had maybe gone but was just the best of the options. I became a true Hillary supporter as I became more informed. I listened to interviews with her and her staffers, and heard the passion with which they addressed the issues. I heard her speak as a young adult, with all her dreams of changing the world for the better. I saw her actually admit to failings and apologize and graciously accept the constant barrage of criticism for those things that just wouldn’t go away. I watched her be interrupted, attacked, and lied about and saw her handle it with a smile on her face and a calm tone in her voice. I saw my friends’ young girls watching a female president come so close to winning the race. I began to hope.

I wore a pantsuit yesterday, in quiet solidarity. I voted, posted the obligatory selfie, and reflected on how monumental what I had just done was. I began to wonder how I could get the time off to join my friend to take her girls to Hillary’s inauguration. I knew the numbers were supposed to be with us, and while I knew that didn’t mean a sure thing, I thought when my parents and I went home and changed into our Democrat donkey pajama pants that we’d be eating popcorn and having fun. It was never fun.

This is the second time this year when the numbers were supposed to be on my side and weren’t. I’m not saying that Trump’s winning the presidency is even close to the same as losing Chris. In spite of the potential horrific impacts to our society, that first loss is still far more potent. But this just proves that no matter what is supposed to happen, sometimes lightning hits twice. Sometimes the numbers don’t work out in your favor. A 98% chance of winning still leaves a 2% chance of losing, and sometimes you lose.

I’ve become good at acceptance. When Chris was told he didn’t have any treatment options, we accepted it as quickly as could be expected and figured out how to live out the next few weeks of his life in the best way possible. I’ve accepted this, despite wanting to look for potential loopholes and ways out. But the feeling of helplessness and lack of hope is much harder to overcome. When your personal life is in shambles, it’s nice to feel a sense of security in other places. We elected a president, but we also elected a Republican Congress, which has already managed to hold up the Supreme Court to ensure that this group will control all three branches of the government for the foreseeable future. That’s not checks and balances, not really, and I don’t feel all that secure.

As a nation, we’ve never completely lived up to the promises of inclusion and freedom upon which we were founded. At best, these results mean that a large (ALMOST half, but not quite) portion of my fellow Americans voted for a man who campaigned in a way that was completely repellent to the other half. Whatever you may feel about policies or the candidates themselves, the rhetoric between the campaigns varied wildly. One actively lied on a regular basis. One used fear to motivate. One used hateful words. One promoted division and exclusion. He’s the one who won last night.

At worst, we are going to have at least two years with a government in Washington that is actively trying to undermine social progress and acceptance. At worst, we’ll spend at least two years reducing regulations and giving businesses even more power, possibly leading us down economic and ecological paths from which we may never recover. At worst, the hatred, fear, and lies will continue to fester to the point where our children will be picking up the pieces. If so, we can only hope they’re strong enough, because we seem not to be.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope the country doesn’t go down the tubes. I hope Democrats go out and vote in two years and take over SOMETHING. I hope that the court isn’t completely turned over in this term, and that in four years we find someone to believe in. But those hopes aren’t the same as the hope I felt before the polls closed. It’s a sad, fledgling hope with no joy to it. In April, I lost my personal dreams and had to work on rebuilding them. Now, as a country, we need to find a way to do that as well.

We used to joke that Chris would die and never have to see Trump’s America. It was supposed to be a joke. It was supposed to be so ridiculous that there was no way it could happen. We were supposed to win the Senate. But here we are, in Trump’s America, and we’ll find a way forward. I can speak from experience though – it won’t be an easy path.

It’s only been a few weeks since the Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump and Billy Bush flooded our Facebook feeds and news reports, and already I feel behind the times by waiting until now to write this post. Still, this was never really about the election or Trump specifically, but more to the reaction to the controversy. More specifically, it’s in response to the reaction of people, some of whom I know and respect, to the women who spoke out against him in the weeks following the tape’s release: why didn’t they speak up earlier?

I can’t answer for those women. I can’t say whether or not Trump did or did not do anything. I also can’t say whether or not the women in question are telling the truth. I can’t even really answer the why, but there is one thing I can say with complete authority. It is entirely possible that a woman would stay silent for decades after having been kissed without permission, having had a man grope their breasts or reach up their skirts without invitation, or having endured any number of other unsolicited physical invasions that stop short of rape. I know because it happened to me.

When I was an eighteen-year-old freshman in college, I fell asleep (platonically) in my friend’s roommate’s bed next to a male friend of ours. He was barely nineteen, and as with most teenagers was enjoying his new freedom by pushing boundaries. Instead of drugs or drinking, his main focus seemed to be the female sex. He was a physically demonstrative person, but the attention he paid was rarely affectionate. Rather, it was almost clinical. He used to brag about how he was studying women, seeing how far he could push their boundaries.

On the morning I woke up in bed next to him, he decided to push my boundaries. I was wakened by the unfamiliar feeling of a man’s hand down my pants. My reaction was mild. I simply pushed his hand away and rolled over. I didn’t leave the bed. I didn’t yell or scream or even slap his hand away. I rolled over.

I did tell my friends, although none of us ever really did anything about it. We continued to include him in our group. One of my friends even continued a consensual mild physical relationship with him. The only one of us who ever had even close to an extreme reaction was Chris, who would eventually become my husband. He continued to harbor anger until he was literally on his deathbed and made me tear up a picture of the man in question.

Chris was right. This “friend” may have been barely a man, but he knew what he was doing, and he committed an invasion of my body that has never really left me. I’m lucky that it’s basically the only thing like it that’s happened to me. Most women aren’t so lucky. But that incident happened in 2001, a whole fifteen years ago. I’ve long since stopped hanging out with him, but I never reported it. I never did anything about it.

The reason I can’t answer why the women who are accusing Trump of various indecent acts is because I can’t even say why I never did anything more than roll over. I never went to anyone in authority. I never even spoke to him. In time, I had myself half convinced I was dreaming and that it didn’t really happen the way I remember, even though I know it happened exactly as I remember. He was interested in seeing how far he could push me, and he found my boundaries without consequence.

So, if it took me fifteen years to speak out, without even being comfortable naming his name, imagine how it might feel to have such a thing happen by a powerful, influential, wealthy man with dozens of lawyers at his beck and call. If I’m still working through the feelings that make it difficult to admit to myself, let alone the world, that what happened that morning was assault, imagine how it must feel to face those feelings when speaking up would make you a household name. I can’t tell you why. I can’t say whether or not the women are telling the truth. But I can say that it is perfectly comprehensible that if something happened to them years ago, it could take a public denial from the man in question to pull them out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

Writing is usually easy for me. Most of the blog posts I’ve written have been typed in one sitting with minimal revision. I used to write school papers the night before they were due and get A grades without much difficulty. It’s usually relaxing – a source of calm rather than stress. In writing this post, however, my heart has been pounding, anxiety rising. It’s been bouncing around in my head for weeks, and it needed to come out, but it’s not a comfortable thing to sent out into the world. It isn’t going to be as clean as it could be, and I’m not going to send it to anyone to help me revise it. It will go out, warts and all, because this isn’t a comfortable or smooth thing for me to write so it’s maybe okay that it not be smooth or comfortable to read.

I know I’m opening myself up to criticism by writing this. I hope that the people reading this blog are kind and accepting, but know that the Internet is generally the opposite. I also know that the person in question may very well read this, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind about the election, but hope that maybe someone will read this and realize that nothing is ever quite as simple as it appears, and that sometimes it takes years for something to come to light – and that may not make it untrue.

If he could wear anything for the rest of his life, Chris would have worn a [blue] cashmere sweater, the palest khaki cargo shorts, and Reef flip-flops. Whether it was thirty degrees or ninety, he’d wear that outfit day after day, except when he had to wear something different for something silly like work. We used to say that if he ever started a blog he should name it Cashmere and Cargo Shorts, not only to pay homage to his favorite clothing, but because it reflected a certain combination of “high” and “low” that appealed to both of our sensibilities.

In April, after an eight-month battle with cancer, Chris was buried in his favorite pale blue cashmere sweater, cargo shorts, and a pair of fuzzy socks (introduced to him in the last few months of his illness, he quipped that they changed his life). One of the hardest parts of losing a partner is not having that person there to talk to, to bounce things off of, to discuss new pop culture and frustrating news stories with. He was constantly telling me that I needed to find other people to talk at, or, better yet, write things down. Now that he’s not here, I have found some other people, but they can never completely fill the void. I’ve always been wary of keeping a blog, but I promised him before he died that I would set up Cashmere and Cargo Shorts, to give me an outlet with which to share my thoughts.

A few weeks after he died, I thought I would try going to see the movie Zootopia and writing a post about it. He and I had planned on seeing it, but by the time it was out in theaters he was too sick to go to the movies. A good plan in theory, I just couldn’t bring myself to communicate with my usual enthusiasm about such a lighthearted movie, although I might have been able to write a decent post about my new, completely expected love of recliner theaters.

Now that over six months have passed, I’m in a slightly better headspace to start the blog. The first couple of posts I have planned, however, weren’t where I initially planned to start. They’re not going to be comfortable, fluffy posts about bunny movies. I haven’t written them yet, so I may change my mind, but if this is a blog in which I write about the things I’d be talking through with my late husband, it’ll have a mixture of things – high and low, fun and serious, and comfortable and potentially discomfiting. Welcome… to a little part of Cory’s brain.