Cast your minds back almost two years ago, to January 20th, 2017. Donald Trump had won the election two months prior, and the day had finally come for him to be officially inaugurated.
The weather was miserable, the turnout was disappointing (unless you ask Trump, who probably thought it was "tremendous"), and the nationwide reaction was pretty negative, on the whole.
While most of the attention was on the 45th president that day, a great deal of it was also given to his predecessor, Barack Obama, and his wife, Michelle. Throughout the ceremony, they looked cool and collected - but everybody knew a storm must have been brewing underneath.
And, sure enough, now Michelle has released a book and started to dish the real dirt on how she felt back then.
While speaking with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, Obama shared details about the process of writing her book, struggles she faced during her marriage, and how she felt right after Donald Trump was sworn in as president.
It was Fallon who raised this last topic, as he held up a picture of Obama with her husband waving from Air Force One on the day of the inauguration.
The talk show host was about to ask about her feelings in that moment, and started to say, "Can you just, walk me through..." but Obama cut him off with just two words:
"Bye, Felicia," she said, to rapturous applause.
"Is that what was going through your mind?" Fallon asked.
"Eh, a lot was going on that day!" Obama replied. "That was a day."
The former first lady also revealed that her daughter had a sleepover the night before the ceremony, in order to say goodbye to the White House for the last time, and that it had been stressful to get ready on schedule.
"I was like, 'Get out, we gotta go!' the 54-year-old said. "And then there was the Tiffany's box. That was a lot."
In her book, the mother-of-two actually admitted that she stopped pretending to look happy during the day.
"Someone from Barack's administration might have said that the optics there were bad, that what the public saw didn't reflect the President's reality or ideals, but in this case, maybe it did," she wrote. "Realizing it, I made my own optic adjustment. I stopped even trying to smile."
But not everything she had to say on The Tonight Show was pessimistic. After she'd opened up about the stress of leaving her position as first lady, she went on to tell Fallon about the optimism she has for the future, and how she believes that all people can build themselves up from nothing, just as she did.
You can check out the interview here.
