Election, 2016 shoveled up things I did not know were sequestered within. Negligible things, significant things, ambushed things. Feelings, fresh, ferocious. Like bones and ghosts arose. Like feral beasts, bray and stampede. And clawed. Through the rot. The clot. The constipation.

I watched CNN. Brink of seat. Knuckles, pale. Put off by pontifications of pompous pundits coupled with Wolf Blitzer’s mind-icing monotone. My jaw descends as the electoral digits ascend for that candidate. The one I never imagined would last past the primaries. But ascend they did. All the F!@#$%& way. And just like that, the preposterous was pronounced, the indecipherable was declared. A death sentence, it felt. He who shall not be named, would be the American president. That reality ripped through the air, like a serrated knife through flesh. And as breathless sound bytes, and primary hued electoral maps zipped across the screens, I found myself in fetal mode.

A delicately timed bomb, I detonated. Sodium-chloride shrapnel. A beast, I bawled. Innards out.

Photo courtesy of UCLA Newsroom

All too subversive. All too surreal. There was no dancing around it, no denying it, it was no dream. It was a Horror Story, in which the person who personified every person that

ostracized me,

violated me,

vilified me,

terrorized me,

would be the world’s king. My king.

That revelation I could not resolve. Not yet. There was an absoluteness, a terrifying truthfulness, not just about the turn of events, this epic twist, this historic upset, but there was something damning, something dreadful about what it did to me. Like a scalpel it sliced me up and exposed my entrails, and forced me to see, brought me to my knees. There are many Americas, and my small and specific America felt ravished, raped. 

The words were all scurrying within me–vermin.

I’m assailed by armies of questions. With inquisitions.

How could this, to borrow Moore’s verbiage, “part-time clown and full-time sociopath,” this puerile narcissist, this racist and misogynist, this draconian demagogue, be the ruler of the “Free” world? With his zero years of public service, and his pussy grabbing antics, how can we rely upon his advocacy? How could he with his twitching twitter finger have any composure when it came to our nuclear codes?

How could he, the “blacks are violent,” he, the “Mexicans are rapists,” “he the “let’s build a wall,” be for us? How could he, the braggadocious wall-erector, the refugee-rejecter ever really care about us?

How could he, The Central Park False Accuser, the discriminator of tenants of color, do everything within his power to address America’s original sin? Would he strive for a more perfect union when he thrives from disunion?

He chest-thumps, “I can shoot someone and still be President,” when have presidents ever been assassins?

How could honorable Americans, the same stand-up guys who voted for Obama, the quintessential Statesman, now elect this, his diametric opposite? His nemesis? How could they (by they, I mean Christ-ians) go with a guy who would not protect their sisters, their brothers, their sisters and brothers that looked like me, felt like me, thought like me, were me? How? 

This person personally wounded me when he questioned the sitting president’s citizenry. His was a carefully calculated project, in which he heisted the power of his privilege to blow dog whistles to those who bunk in the sties of squalor. Sties of squalor, where fear, rage and animus stew. When someone of the unmarked category questions the validity of those in a marked category, the metrics are never neutral, there are things that are insidiously and subliminally injected, like sniper bullets. Stealthily they perpetrate devastation in unseen, untouchable spaces. 

Spaces in security lines, where us brown people are sidelined and frisked, where our identification cards are given double looks because we look, you know, a bit more fishier than “most.” Because being American, means being not brown. 

In retrospect, I realize that the prior disconnection from this election was not my being apolitical, or even antipolitical, it in fact was a defense mechanism to drown out the dirty dog whistles that would only drill in what an Other I always knew I was.

That Other in the European schools, tortured by teachers, picked on by peers. The Other, peculiar because of the pigment in her skin, feared because she was foreign. For-eign even with her “kin.” Christian kin, Indian kin. A piece of paper proves a citizenry, but it’s scratches on parchment, letters on vellum. My soul forever felt alone, forever felt unmoored.

Oth-er. A seemingly impotent word, impotent in it’s generality. Impotent in its ubiquity. And yet it’s heaviness my shoulders have hauled. Poor posture portrays the pain, the shame of being seen. My accent always adjusts. With oversized sunnies, I shield my portals. I vanquish into the vista, a camoed-soldier…

Then I realize it’s not about him.

It’s about me.

It’s about PTSD.

Yes, PTSD.

Must eke the words out. Must push the poison out. Must shoot that gun, but aim it at no one but this cadaverous canvas.

And so I let it flow. Hemorrhaging like that woman who touched Jesus’ robe. All the ghouls within…