Blue

By: Gabriela Yareliz
This morning I woke up at 4 a.m. from a nightmare. I looked at my phone and saw that the nightmare was nothing compared to what had actually happened last night.
I spent last night in Manhattan at the NBC Democracy Plaza/ Rockefeller Center. Big screens flashed candidate state wins. Each time Hillary won a state, there were cheers. Around 10 p.m., things got eerie. The map was the shade of one of my favorite lipsticks; looks of tense concern hung.
Trump Tower was surrounded with salt and sanitation trucks, snipers and police.
New York is the classic example of
voting while keeping your neighbor in mind. Most of us are surrounded by friends or family who may not be able to vote because of immigration status. However, just because a majority of the people one sees on the trains can’t vote, we vote for them, to protect them. We vote with a solidarity with the one who sits next to us on the train as we race through Chinatown to get to Spanish Harlem. We vote knowing we want the person next to us to stay there.

The rest of the country should take a note on that type of solidarity, not the kind it showed yesterday. The country made it abundantly clear last night that it hates Hillary so much it preferred an orange bigot in the White House. They elected a man who almost forgot to thank his own Vice President during his own victory speech. He spent more time thanking Hillary than Mike Pence, himself.

Ohio and Florida lost their minds, however pockets of Florida showed a surprisingly blue resistance (Miami-Dade was not about to support the man who insulted their boy Marco Rubio). Michigan played diva, and Wisconsin broke all of our hearts.

The city is cloudy and rainy today. It’s a day of mourning for those of us in weird pockets of privilege who thought the polls were reflecting us accurately. It’s a day of celebration for the majority of the nation that overwhelmingly elected, not only a red president, but a red congress.

I am going to be honest, the only thing red on me is my lipstick, but my heart is blue, in more ways than one.