It’s 10am Central European Time on November 9th, 2016, and I’ve just rolled out of bed on the top floor of an Airbnb in Bruges, Belgium. My wife, Melinda, is still in bed. It’s the day after the U.S. presidential election, and I open my laptop to confirm what has seemed inevitable for months: Hillary Clinton is President of the United States. We’d voted weeks earlier, and had spent last night in one of the city’s storied beer bars ignoring the drama back home.

The room turns grey around me as I see the news. My heart beats with that dull, thudding panic you feel when you realise you just sent a very personal text to the wrong person.

“Love?” I say, tentatively.

“Yeah?” she answers groggily from the bed.

“He won.”

The room is silent for several seconds.

“Oh.”

We will need more beer before the day is over.

***

When you step out of one of the legendary beer bars of Bruges—such as Café Rose Red or ‘t Brugs Beertje—well after midnight and walk home on the cobblestone streets, crossing bridges over canals that may or may not have a swan or two gliding along them silently, and you don’t see another living soul your entire walk, it feels like this city exists only for you. It was spun from the fibres of some alcohol-soaked vision you had on the burnished wood of the evening’s final bartop, and in the morning it will be gone.

““My heart beats with that dull, thudding panic you feel when you realise you just sent a very personal text to the wrong person.””

It will, of course, still be there in the morning, and you’ll be reminded the city does, in fact, belong to everyone. It belongs to couples trying to take engagement photos in the middle of crowded pedestrian thoroughfares, and it belongs to that oblivious guy over there with the selfie stick who is about to clothesline an unsuspecting cyclist. Most of all, it belongs to the Belgian residents who open their city to the world every day, sweeping off the front steps of their establishments as the sun rises and locking the doors long after it sets.

We’d already been in the city for a week by election day and had been asked to explain Donald Trump to more Belgians than I can remember. A tone of good-natured condescension and convivial forbearance would overtake them as they asked, like parents trying their best to connect with their middle schoolers by asking them to explain Tik-Tok—the answer was irrelevant; the point was listening to us try to come up with one.

In ‘t Brugs Beertje—once the haunt of famed beer writer Michael Jackson—there was a portly rabbit hunter with whom I bandied jovially about politics and beer, apologising for the American intrusion of both upon his fine land. He didn’t even bother to craft a complete sentence or affix an interrogative to his request for explanation. He fixed me with a well-lubricated gaze and just said, “Trump,” with a shrug. I nodded my head several times, made to answer, and sipped my beer instead. I asked him about rabbit hunting, the only topic that could distract him.

If you’re from the United States, you know one thing is absolutely true when you’re travelling abroad: hell is other Americans. You’re always trying to prove you’re one of the good ones, and this is never more true than when your country is on the precipice of electing a xenophobic sexual assailant with the vocabulary of a child to the highest office in the land. When our Airbnb host, Marjan, asked us a few days before the election—with an earnestness veiled by jocularity—just what the hell was going on, we downplayed it. We’re as confused as you are, but rest assured reason will prevail. Have you seen the numbers? He’s doomed. This soap opera is almost over. We’ll take breakfast at nine.

Our week in this beautiful medieval city allowed us to ignore the coming nightmare with evenings drinking vintage gueuze in the kitschy comforts of Café Rose Red and afternoons downing Orval on canal terraces. We strolled every forgotten corner of this city that had been one of the trade capitals of the western world, long before the first Europeans landed in North America. Drinking abbey ales in Le Trappiste, a bar in a cellar from the 13th century, lends some perspective to a once-every-four-years stressor. Things were going to be okay.

And then they weren’t.

***

We stepped out on the morning of November 9th in a daze. Marjan heard us coming down the stairs and came out to meet us, positively tickled by the hilarity of it all. She had hosted a viewing party and wanted to recap every outlandish moment of our distress like a particularly absurd professional wrestling match. We muttered something conciliatory and crept away. We met with this attitude from Belgians throughout the day. It wasn’t their fault, but their amusement was salt in the wound. The sky, at least, had the decency to don its funeral garb, raining and scowling throughout our afternoon spent wandering about with bewildered looks on our faces.

““We spilled out into the darkened streets of Bruges in search of the final beer that would make it all make sense, or make it all go away.””

That evening we drank at De Garre, a bar hidden down a narrow alley near the central Market Square. Their 11.5% ABV house tripel is both potent and palliative, and there’s a quasi-official three glass maximum we’d never actually seen enforced on previous trips. When their efficient bartender told us we’d hit the limit, I told him our country had just elected an asshole, and we just wanted one more round. He laughed—and got that now familiar gleam in his eye as he briefly recounted his own viewing of the news the night before—but didn’t relent. We spilled out into the darkened streets of Bruges in search of the final beer that would make it all make sense, or make it all go away.

We descended the steps into ‘t Poatersgat, a cellar bar that’s the closest to a dive bar you’ll find among the great beer bars of Bruges, with table football, inadequate lighting, a chatty barkeeper, and not one damn thing to eat. We wandered in after midnight and set about getting quietly, respectfully sloshed. We would fly back the next day, back to a land that no longer felt like home. Friends, coworkers, and family members we’d shared laughter and tears with had voted for a monster, and would now want to move on like it was all “just politics.”

As we stumbled home through the darkened streets, the city no longer existed only for us. Nothing did. To be American now felt like being an unhouse-trained puppy on the world’s clean carpeting. There would be protests, and inspirational calls to arms, and grassroots campaigns for change, but nothing felt hopeful on those dark, wet streets halfway around the world.

Four years later, we wouldn’t be able to leave the country to drink on election day. 2020 has followed every sucker punch with a harder one, and I’m eyeing November 3rd with dread, regardless of the polls once again suggesting positivity. Against all rational argument, a significant portion of the U.S. populace feels a schoolyard bully is the answer to our national woes.

This year, we’ll pass election night alone in our apartment, nursing bottles of the strongest Belgian beer we can find. Hell is still other Americans.