Heard it first from a friend. Needed to do something. Anything. Better than sitting at home feeling small and powerless. Called my little sister. She hadn’t heard, and she took it hard.

My thoughts are racing in circles, saying I don’t know what to do. I am frightened.

And a voice answers back, and says you have had some of the finest mentors that anyone could dare to hope for. You did not spend all of that time learning from them only to get lost in feeling hopeless now. If anyone could find a way, it would be someone who’d been lucky enough to be taught by them.

You have friends. You don’t have to do this alone. We will continue to fight. We will go on finding ways to take care of one another.

Got in the car and took an impromptu road trip to the birthplace of women’s rights in the US. I couldn’t think of a better place to be, on this day of all days. I needed the catharsis of being part of history, of standing in a crowd and yelling and crying and marching and peacefully breaking the rules. Somebody was banging a wooden spoon on a cake pan. There were drums. People cheered out their car windows and hooked their horns as they drove by, and each time this happened it was met with a deafening wave of sound.

It felt good to be surrounded by strangers who needed to be together and know they weren’t alone. It felt good to look over my shoulder and see a big parade of people in the streets.

I didn’t carry a sign but I have never in my life been able to hold back tears for the sake of politeness and maybe tears said something that words couldn’t.

When I remember this day, I can look back and know that I was there for the woman walking beside me, the one with the tattoos she covered with bandaids and a long sleeve shirt, the woman with a nose ring and brown eyes and faded pink hair shaved close on the sides, the woman who will not have a voice tomorrow because she needed to scream at the top of her lungs with all the shaken grief and bitter rage and bone-tired disappointment that a woman who hasn’t yet seen her twentieth year should never have to feel.

In the quietness after the crowds dispersed, I sat in the grass and watched as she slowly read the words carved into the rock wall of the fountain. “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men and women are created equal.”

And I remembered teaching her to read when she was small.

I hope it’s a good night.