It is a dreary, damnable November night when my vote and I sit apprehensively in our recliners, watching the returns come in. The horror: midwestern red comes in much faster than midwestern blue, our senators are falling; the water surrounding our pretty liberal islands is rising and its sharks are growing legs. My vote goes out for a walk, it needs to assess the scope of the disaster and consider its options. Of course, a good number of walks terminate in bars, and given that night's horror, drinking is inevitable.

My vote, despite its loneliness, is not alone – many votes sit here grieving, arguing, commiserating. They all shoot tequila. My vote chats up a vote who has amazing sapphire eyes and their decision to leave together is half reckless resignation and half attempted distraction; but by then a cruel sunrise is faint in the east and my vote is rendered impotent by all the alcohol and the two votes roll away from each other and sleep fitfully and suffer cottonmouth nightmares. My vote stumbles home in the bleary, red-eyed afternoon.

Do not turn on the news, my vote says, Please, anything but that. I say But there will be recounts. It says None will matter. I say We will never allow men with swords to ascend our mountaintops. And my vote laughs in the way that one must laugh precisely because nothing is funny. We do not, and cannot, speak to one another. When I wake the following morning my vote is gone, along with my credit card. Go, I say aloud, have some fun, return when you feel better.

A credit card statement arrives, I follow the charges. I too fly to the Azores. I check into the same hotel and walk to the beach. Once there, I fantasize about a reunion with my vote: we would regard the pretty blue water, the pretty blue sky. I would ask my vote to come home, but if it responded We are already home, then I would not disagree, and we would remain there until our nation, and perhaps our world, decided to share in the peace that we already enjoyed.

Alas, I do not find my vote in the Azores. I receive a new statement and follow the charges to Kiev. I do not find my vote in Kiev. I do not find my vote in Bamako. I do not find my vote in Bhutan, East Timor, or Jerusalem; nor Quito, Kyoto, San Salvador. I meet people who have met my vote. They hesitate to share information with me. I wonder: is it because they fear my reaction to sad news, or because they fear betraying their new, sullen friend?

In Amsterdam I follow the credit card charges to a prostitute. I must reassure her of my good intentions, and I must pay her for conversation only, but finally she tells me my vote laughs the laughter of those who want to but cannot mask their melancholy; she tells me my vote drinks to kill its hangovers; she tells me my vote always wears a new scar and a newer wound; she tells me I might no longer recognize it if I passed it in the street of the world.

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