After years of crying herself to sleep for other reasons, Maggie Peterman fell asleep last night to her own muffled cries as she sobbed about the loss of her beloved United States of America instead of a sack-of-shit ex.
“Whenever I go through a bad breakup, I have trouble sleeping and usually I’ll have some drinks and just cry about my ex until I pass out,” Peterman says. “But lately when I lay there, feeling like something’s missing, I realize it’s the basic human decency that our country used to stand for.”
Peterman says it’s a completely new experience to not be haunted by painful romantic memories while drifting off to sleep, and instead be haunted by the bleak and distressing state of the country.
“I used to just go through pictures of an old boyfriend on my phone and cry and cry until I eventually fell asleep, but now all it takes is the homepage of CNN or really any media at all to get me sobbing,” she says. “I’m just so afraid I’ll never be happy again–not in the way I was with David, but the way I was when we lived in a democratic society.”
Peterman, who was previously consumed by a series of failed relationships, is now expressing grief over the gradual loss of judicial power and the appointment of white nationalists for top government positions.
“Sometimes I’ll lay awake and wonder, what’s Steve doing right now?” she says. “Steve Bannon—not Steven the jackass who dumped me after three months even though he told me he loved me.”
Peterman added that sometimes she thinks she’s “all out of tears” but will see a dog with an American flag bandana and “lose it all over again.”
“It’s hard to get over it. I thought what we had was real.”
