Around December, my blood pressure started to run higher. It's been controlled for years with a simple steady pill. 

A little over a month later and I'm taking three different pills every night and it's not under control despite everything we've tried. 

Maybe one of the reasons it won't go down is because the federal government is engaged in domestic terror against Minnesota. Maybe it is that I have seen ICE in action repeatedly outside the gym. Maybe it is that a vibrant neighborhood is now a ghost town and the only people I see on the street are neighbors organized in watches trying to protect each other. Maybe it is the horror stories I've heard from every single person I know here - like my realtor who has to stand guard shifts outside their daycare or the guy who sits next to me at hockey games who lives down the street from where an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross executed a queer poet named Renee Good in the street. Maybe it seeing every day these small, vicious people throw tear gas and brutalize people while trying to instill fear. Maybe it is seeing the federal government refuse to do anything and the courts fail to enforce any law. Maybe it seeing children thrown to the snow in subzero weather and handcuffed by ICE agents wearing masks and no badges. 

Maybe it is knowing the federal government is mobilizing military units for potential deployment into the city where I live.

Maybe it is learning my in-laws have been Trump supporters all this time.

Maybe it is that a friend of mine died early on the 2nd and that I'm so homesick I cry and it's not any safer there but for different reasons.

Maybe it is having years of reading and studying Russian/Soviet history and literature and seeing how unpleasantly similar these events are.

Every day I wonder when they start hunting trans people along with immigrants. We already have concentration camps and they are already places where queer people like me are tortured. Every day I wonder when they will automate and mechanize the process of death.

Every day I wonder if I am doing something for the last time.

Every day I wonder what it will take to stop this, and whether we're capable of it. Every day I wonder if there is a single person in my family who would do a goddamn thing to protect me. 

Every day I am more unforgiving of the people who support this, the people who voted for it and the people who don't care enough to do anything.