Yesterday, it was beautiful in New York, unseasonably warm, but with November’s brand of curling sun. Perfect weather for waiting in a long line to cast a vote and then walking around with a multi-pronged, fuck-yeah ebullience. In email chains and Facebook posts and Instagram comments, there were giddy, reclamatory uses of  “nasty” and “badass,” photos of suffragettes’ sticker-coated headstones, and so many variations of #withher. We were poised on the precipice of righteousness; we were buoyant and thirsty; we were ready to revel.

At the DNC this summer (how long ago that feels, now), there was a sense that patriotism, long the far right’s excuse for acts of prejudice and vitriol, might become a rallying cry for unity on the left. Both of the Obamas’ speeches made me proud to be an American, a pride that was kicked along by the Olympics and reached its apex about 30 minutes in to the first presidential debate.  Whatever pluckings of disbelief I felt at the polls being as close as they were (for even a margin of 20 percentage points felt close, given what was on the fuzzy end of that margin) were stayed by a confidence that Hillary would not, could not lose.

I live in a bubble. I’ve known that for years, but I didn’t really understand it until last night, when the New York Times forecast gauge slipped from blue to pink to red. Somewhere around the time Florida was called for Trump, that bubble burst.

Today is not blue or pink or red. It is still warm, but not sunny and there are no frissons of ebullience to be had. Today is grey and the people I pass on the streets are grey and the man on the subway with his head in his hands is grey and I myself feel grey in a way I have never felt before. Instinct tells me to flee – not out of fear but out of anger and spite and a refusal to own our new reality. Braver to stay and fight – but how, with no house and no senate and the certainty of a conservative court and the spectre of alt-right death-eaters making preparations for their February feast?

One way, the way that seems most obvious, is to use the free tools that Trump employed so effectively against him, to combat his lies with truths, to share the fears of the frightened and disenfranchised so that they might be allayed, to keep insisting that patriotism is love and not hate. If we rage enough against the dying of the light, we just might revive it.