On Election Day, the day the future of this country will be decided, I’ll be nearly 6,000 miles away. On the day we decide whether we are, in fact, going to continue being a democracy, I’ll be in the land where democracy was born.

      It will be weird.

      If we can stay up late—say, for us, maybe to midnight—it will only be 5 p.m. on the east coast of the U.S. No polls will have closed, no voting finished. When the last polls in the U.S. close on Election Day, at midnight Eastern Standard Time, it will be 7 a.m. the next day on the island of Crete, in Greece.

      I’m sure the Greeks will be paying attention, as will the whole world. But with the time difference and 6,000 miles of distance, everybody won’t be glued anxiously to CNN, watching the votes trickling in, listening to Wolf Blitzer and the others call, we hope, Pennsylvania for Harris, or Michigan too close to call, or what the early signs are looking like in Arizona.

      We won’t be at a watch party at a neighborhood empanada place, surrounded by others cheering the news, we hope, that Kamala has taken the lead in Nevada. We won’t be at home with friends, sharing our hopes, confronting our fears.

      After a day of moussaka and cobblestoned streets and the ruins of an ancient temple, we’ll be in a hotel room, without a television, feverishly checking our phones, and will go to sleep without knowing.

      And we also probably won’t know, at least not immediately, who will become our state’s new attorney general—the progressive who went to high school with our son or the reactionary who introduced the notorious “bathroom bill.” We probably won’t know, at least not until later, who won the state legislative races for which we canvassed or our local town council election and whether the local school bond had, in fact, passed.

      It won’t be the first time. We’ve been far away on Election Day before.

      Just a couple of months after we moved to Paris, we requested absentee ballots to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976. The ballots, sent by the state of our previous residence, New York, got to us, not surprisingly, late. If we mailed them back, they would not arrive to be counted in time. We had to drop the ballots off at the American embassy in Paris, which said they would courier them back to America. But even they couldn’t guarantee that the ballots would arrive in time to be counted.

      It was frustrating.

      So, yes, this time we voted early, before departure.

      And yes, we know that in an expected close election the final results of the presidential race may not be known for several days after Nov. 5, maybe not until we’ve returned from abroad, and that if they lose, the Trumpers will not go away easily or quickly and the final determination may still be in doubt even weeks later.

      Still, Election Day isn’t just a civic event, but—this year in particular—a kind of communal catharsis, a rite we’ll be missing.

      We hadn’t planned on being away for Election Day, but that’s how the schedule worked out. So, we’re trying to see the upside. Maybe it will be better being far away. Maybe it will give us perspective, lessen the anxiety. Maybe, being at a remove, we’ll be better able to process.  

      Or maybe, and most likely, we’ll forego more moussaka and cobblestoned streets and spend the next day feverishly scrolling through our phones again, trying to find out what happened 6,000 miles away.