The Dull Heartbeat of a Crying Nation

The steady, breathless, thump thump. thump thump. thump thump. I hear it every morning, every night – with every retweet and every like a nation holds it breath. And you can feel the tension in the pit of its chest. I woke up three days in a row, checking Twitter expecting to hear the monotone wail of the frail heart flatlining – followed shortly thereafter by my own. Every day I left my house, didn’t know if when I came home there would be no blood in the aorta. Being entirely honest, I felt sorta scared. Scratch that, petrified that a nation’s voice would once again be cast aside by an archaic system crafted by the unworked hands of those who owned slaves, a system that necessitated white maleness and land-owning to have any sort of say, and so I doom scroll in silence, the only ambiance the steady thump thump of a heart I swore was dying – the dull heartbeat of a nation softly crying, waiting to see if their voices even matter.