The news is on in every corner of my house. My grandma’s room, Clarkson’s computer on the dining room table, and the big TV in the living room. 

Trump’s voice came on and I was adrenalined to hear what he was saying. I almost never actively seek to hear what he has to say. I’ve been living alone for the past year, and have processed huge events on my own time, with my cat, and everyone so indifferent and so upset and so jaded around me. Vieques.

The reporter that played trump’s clip said he felt ambivalent about showing the clip because he understands the need to do so and supports it, but is wary of the message, of the inability on Trump’s part to fully condemn. Tessa isn’t responding to me and she lives in Capitol Hill. Someone is having a Three King’s Day party on one side of my window, and I have a house full of sedition on the other. The pigeons that have woken up me up for the past week and a half are flying around my neighbor’s roof.

Next to me: a Cameo wrapper, deoderant, a mason jar that holds small pink and white fabric flowers squished between seashells. This room has been mine and Giselle's room since we were little girls. Exactly a week ago, during a scuba diving trip in Fajardo, Clarkson proposed to Giselle underwater. Afterwards, they had an engagement party at Cueva del Mar, which is where the flowers and seashells came from.  Sparkly blue tinsel and a small mylar engagement ring balloon poke out of a glass vase.

I'm using the trundle bed as a chair and reading an email from an organization that warns:
The danger isn't a successful coup. We won that battle. The danger is that public trust in our democracy is being degraded by blatant lies and an echo chamber devoid of fact-checking.

Here we're in different territory than stopping a coup. We're seeing blistering splits in the Republican Party. We see a rise in a right-wing media echo chamber's ability to create myths like a "stolen election" out of thin air, devoid of hard facts and unwilling to self-correct. We see polarization that makes it harder to interact and engage meaningfully with each other. If unchecked these could prove fatal to democracy; it certainly means we will have more political instability and uncertainty in the future.

I had thought the danger of the coup had passed, maybe wrongly so. If such a long time can pass without unrest and protest, we are in the clear, or something like that. Why would I be poised for a coup, whether in prediction or preparations? I’ve been living in a world with insulated simultaneously clear and fuzzy diurnal problems that take up a lot of space, and also get pushed to the background entirely.

That’s how these past four years have been, right? We're all dogs on fire drinking tea in an environment we were never meant to acclimate to. The roller rink of atrocities can not be reckoned with! But we reckon with it every morning just the same! 5 things you missed while you were gone! You're All Caught Up Now, but for world news. By ‘world' I mean I’m just trying to look past my toes.

One TV is in Spanish and the other is in English. I didn’t even stop by the Spanish one to hear how they were speaking about the event differently. That’s a thing I like to do. Today I didn’t do it.

CNN changed their headline from "protesters" to "mob," I think. Good?

Sometimes, I am embittered by the futility of language.