A month ago, I was putting together a grocery list for Thai curry mussels—my contribution to a home cooked Valentine’s Day dinner Gabe and I were planning—when Gabe called me en route to his neighborhood H-E-B.

The whole week, ice slowly formed on the tree branches and plants in his neighborhood and every time I visited, I’d tell him that even though we live just 8 miles apart, the weather on his side of town was drastically different than mine (where so far, it had only ever been rainy and overcast). So when he told me that there was so much ice on the road leading to his apartment complex that cars were unable to control themselves on the level and short drive between his apartment and his grocery store, I wrote it off as something only Austin’s northwest side was experiencing.

Fearing my sedan wouldn’t make it down the icy road leading to Gabe’s place, we decided to rain check. That morning, around 4 am, my dog woke up and demanded to go out. When we stepped onto our stoop, what should have been pitch black morning was instead bright with moonlight bouncing off of snow. Shakespeare thought better of it and we came inside and got back under our comforter. When the sun rose, I noticed my WiFi was out and, finding a spot in my place with adequate 5G, was able to check my emails and see that UT closed campus and cancelled all classes on account of the bad weather.

That first day, I spent the afternoon collaging and had a FaceTime appointment with my therapist. On her side of town, the power was out. By the second day of the snowstorm, hundreds of thousands of people in Texas were going without power and running water in freezing temperatures. A small group of AADS faculty, after safely getting booked into a hotel with power (no small feat), decided to start a mutual aid collective to assist people who weren’t able to financially scale getting groceries, clean water, or a hotel during storm Uri.

That night, one of the professors organizing the effort put out a call for people with power who could help book people in Austin and Houston into hotels. For the next several days, I and a small group of new Twitter friends checked a spreadsheet of people seeking assistance, texted people, sent money, and booked hotel rooms to the extent that I maxed out my credit card, that booking.com called me to verify that I was making these reservations willingly, and that finally my venmo and cashapp were locked due to suspicious activity. Shortly thereafter, our mutual aid funds were frozen by Venmo for similar reasons and the group pivoted to direct action in Austin: boiling and bottling water, cooking whatever we had and boxing it, and delivering it to anyone needing water and food.

This isn’t a feel good story. In fact, it was heart breaking work. At one point, I started to feel relieved because we were just a handful of people shy of booking a room for everyone who needed one. Then I refreshed the spreadsheet and there were 600 new requests for assistance. My stomach dropped knowing that there were only so many people I’d actually be able to reach. The longer the snowstorm persisted, the more people I’d reach out to who would tell me that they’d survived a couple of days without power and now, their power was restored or they had a safe, warm place to stay with family and friends. But conversely, the longer Uri continued, the more desperate the folks who were in the worst positions became. One single mother’s phone died while we tried to get her booked into a room. When we lost communication, I held off on the room and went to bed. In the morning, I had over a dozen messages from her—pictures of her collapsed roof; photos of her children huddled under a makeshift fort in her living room, the floor wet with melting snow. “Please, please don’t forget about us”; “please, help my children”; “is no one going to help us?”

There’s a commercial I remember from when I was a kid. I don’t remember the product or service it was advertising, but I remember the voice over. It was about a man who approaches a little girl at the beach. She’s throwing starfish back into the ocean after a storm trapped them on shore. “There’s too many, you can’t save them all,” the man tells her. Picking up another starfish and tossing it into the sea, the girl replies, “yes, but I saved that one.” I remembered it as an empowering story but last month, as I called and texted and booked and refreshed spreadsheets knowing that the temperature was going to drop dramatically once the sun set, and as I woke up in the morning to read about people who froze to death or died in their sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning, I felt exactly the opposite— I felt powerless.

Four weeks later, I’m still trying to make sense of it (and still struggling everyday with the sense that I didn’t do enough). From what I’ve read, Uri was a forced disaster—no one can help the snow, but the mass power outages, the water shortages, and the general unpreparedness at the state level were preventable (much of it was, in fact, brought about by deregulation). In a year so rife with preventable deaths, smarter people than I are putting pen to paper about the U.S. and necropolitics. I wish I had it in me to say something illuminating or beautiful about it all. But right now, the only words I have are, “they should all be here with us.”