Sarah’s mornings always started the same way: with dread settling into her bones before she even opened her eyes. The news notifications she’d muted still somehow leaked into her dreams—headlines about transition teams, executive orders waiting to be signed, protests being planned in state capitals.
She tried everything to maintain normalcy. Meditation apps couldn’t compete with the chatter at work about what the new administration might mean for their industry. Gratitude journals felt hollow when half her social media contacts were posting about leaving the country. Her therapist’s breathing exercises couldn’t slow the accelerating pulse of a nation holding its breath.
The feeling followed her everywhere. It lingered in grocery store aisles where people were stockpiling again, though no one would admit why. It sat beside her during family dinners that had grown quieter, certain topics now carefully avoided. It whispered to her during midnight scrolling sessions, where every analysis and prediction pointed to changes that would reshape the landscape of everything she’d known.
One particularly heavy morning, when the weight of the coming days pressed so hard against her chest that her apartment walls seemed to bend inward, Sarah did something different. Instead of checking the latest polls or reading another expert’s interpretation, she put on her shoes.
The trail behind her complex was barely more than a deer path, overgrown with brambles and forgotten by the city’s parks department. As she walked deeper into the woods, the morning fog clung to her clothes like a second skin. A cardinal darted across her path, a flash of defiant red against the grey.
The doom didn’t leave her—it never really did—but here, among the indifferent trees and busy squirrels, it felt different. Administrations would change, societies would transform, but today the moss was impossibly green, and mushrooms pushed through dead leaves with quiet determination. Nature didn’t share her anxiety about transfer of power; it simply continued its ancient cycle of growth and decay.
Sarah kept walking, letting the mist settle on her eyelashes. The weight was still there, but now it felt more like witnessing history than drowning in it—just another moment of change in an endlessly turning world.