We Felt Every Nerve

This morning I woke to the smell of scorched metal in Louisville, where a piece of me fell from the sky yesterday. The wreckage of UPS Flight 2976 still smoldered as investigators pulled its black boxes from the crushed MD-11, and I felt myself grieving through firefighters rinsing soot from their arms and families staring at the cratered blocks that once held their routines.

In Washington, I stood in the longest shutdown I have ever inflicted on myself—day 35—my federal workers lining up for free meals while the Supreme Court argued over whether a president could call almost anything an emergency in the name of tariffs. I listened to nine justices dissect a single word while the people who guard my airports and process my food inspections went without pay.

Across my states, I tallied ballots: Abigail Spanberger becoming Virginia’s first woman governor, Mikie Sherrill taking New Jersey’s helm, Zohran Mamdani rising as New York City’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor. I felt power shift beneath my own feet, a recalibration after a bruising year of shutdowns, protests, and contested authority.

In Brussels I split myself between ambition and loophole as the European Union pledged a 90% emissions cut by 2040 but carved out space for carbon credits to soften the blow. Meanwhile in New Delhi I released gleaming new AI governance guidelines that promised innovation first and regulation later, even as markets on the other side of the world trembled under the weight of AI-stock selloffs.

In Gaza I queued for food beneath torn tarps, counting trucks allowed in and bodies reluctantly released under ceasefire terms. In Sudan I buried more of myself, drone fragments and gunfire tracing the outlines of mass graves in Darfur and North Kordofan. I felt hunger, fear, and dust settle into my lungs as if I were the one fleeing.

Then night fell and I lit myself from within. On Varanasi’s ghats I placed thousands of lamps along the Ganga for Dev Diwali and watched brass aarti flames arc over the river. In the UAE I lifted a Beaver Supermoon into a desert sky, bright enough to pull families outdoors with blankets and telescopes. In Minneapolis I hummed purple chords outside a theater premiering a new telling of Prince’s ‘Purple Rain.’

Tonight I carry all of it—the fire, the voting booths, the courtrooms, the food lines, the moonlit river. On this day I felt every nerve I possess, raw and electric, and I write it down so I will remember what it means to be whole.