When the alarm went off at 6am, E. and I rose up like a shot.  Where ordinarily the hazy dark blueness of our bedroom and layers of blankets – armor in our battle of wills against turning on the heat – serve to cushion us from the world, paralyzing us in a half-conscious snuggle, this morning we awoke amped, cadets with a mission.  We made out each others’ dark silhouettes and reached in for a high-five.  “Voting day!” we cried, and raced each other downstairs to make coffee.

***

IT’S A HEADY experience, democracy, except when you realize how mundane it is in practice.  We stood in a freezing line, the sunrise streaming through our exhales, as we snaked around the red-brick elementary school that, today, would become our voice.  There was a charge to the air, yes, but it was contained on our level, so local and manageable, cute, even.  For something so abstract and sweeping, after months of pundits feeding our insatiable addictions to the national dialogue, we found ourselves enfolded, so unexpectedly, in a small pocket of community.  Our landlords were up ahead of us; one of them came over to our bit of line to say hi and ask us if we still wanted the new dishwasher we’d hinted at over the summer.  We stopped to wave back to the couple who lived next door as they strode to the back of the ever-increasing line, further away from us than when we sleep at night.  How similar we all looked, stomping to keep warm in the frigid air.  7am voters are a fairly homogenous demographic, the pre-work, grown-up commuters in their grown-up coats, a demographic that, even as I stared with wistful familiarity at the kindergarten Thanksgiving cut-outs, I had to concede that I was a part of.

 ***

WE TOOK OUR stiff ballots and disappeared into the make-shift dividers, as flimsy and temporary as cardboard, to connect lines with ironclad certainty.  I wished it had taken longer.  I wanted to savor it, not simply glide through with keener-like confidence, so sure I studied the right material, so secure in my answers.  I finished early.  I checked and double-checked my lines, a little skeptical at how easy it all was.  I got bored.  My head slowly rose over the side of the divider as I stood on tiptoes to see first E.’s curls, then his scarf, then his back as he bent over his choices, cupped protectively by his arm.  I squinted to make out what I could.  He saw me.

“Hey, go away!” he hissed.  “Secret ballot!”

Hard-earned proportional representation in hand, we were shuffled to a seated older woman in horn-rimmed glasses and a terrible knitted sweater.  She loudly proclaimed to love our street as she checked off our names, and wouldn’t let us feed the ballots to the machine until we admitted, by way of fondling a crinkled photograph, that she did indeed have the cutest granddaughter around.  A dated, yellowing voting machine swallowed our ballots whole.  Democracy achieved.

***

IT ISN’T JUST that my candidates won, and that E.’s home state decided it all.  And it isn’t the onslaught of public opinion in the aftermath, the unending internet commentary, the drunken sleepiness of the next morning, the security of the fiercely-won status quo.  Our whole unimaginably large, impossibly unwieldy country was watching the returns together, was hovering their collective fingers over their “post comment” buttons, was holding their collective breath, and yet for us, Election Day brought us home, literally.

We have neighbors, we realized.