CROWNED IN QUICKSAND: A War Cry From My Dark Room

King: noun - the male ruler of an independent state, especially one who inherits the position by right of birth.

Quicksand: noun - a thing that entraps or overwhelms, especially something that is hard to escape from.

This morning, anxiety didn't knock—it kicked down my door and made itself at home in my body. Work is suffocating me. Purpose feels like a word in a language I used to speak fluently but can no longer pronounce. Stuck. That's the word that pulses through my veins alongside my blood. Tingles crawl across my skin like fire ants, each one carrying a message from my racing mind: You are not safe. You have never been safe. You will never be safe.

My body is screaming for a break, but there are no breaks when you are Black, Puerto Rican, and gay in an America that treats your existence like a declaration of war.

I thought about him this morning. The orange man who sits in the White House like a petulant child on a stolen throne. The man who is threatened by the very fact that I breathe, that I love, that I create, that I refuse to disappear. My skin—this beautiful, melanin-rich skin that holds centuries of survival—is a target. The sex I have, the love I make, the way I move through the world with hips that don't lie and a voice that won't soften—all of it makes me prey in a country that was built on hunting people who look like me.

Everything that makes me special—my superpowers—terrifies him and the legion of Republicans who follow him like disciples of mediocrity. This land, this blood-soaked soil built on the broken backs of my ancestors who were dragged here in chains, and on the dreams of immigrants who came seeking something better, is now being wielded as a weapon against us. History doesn't just repeat itself, boo—it remixes the same tired song and expects us to dance to it again.

I want to run. God knows I want to run. But where do you run when the whole world is on fire? Every country has its demons, but America's demons wear suits and hold Bibles and smile while they strip away your humanity piece by piece. Our shit feels particularly rancid right now, like fruit left to rot in the sun, and we're all forced to smell it, to taste it, to live in it.

So I create. I write. I dream. I claw my way through this quicksand that threatens to swallow me whole. Because that's what anxiety feels like—quicksand. The more you struggle, the deeper you sink. The more you try to breathe, the more the sand fills your lungs. I'm sinking, and I don't know if anything can pull me out. Not therapy. Not pills. Not prayer. Not the distant hope that things will get better.

The narcissism of Donald Trump runs loops in my mind like a song I can't unhear. His elderly ugliness—not of his face, but of his soul—haunts me. That picture of him, bloated with power and devoid of humanity, is burned into my consciousness. I want it out. I need it out. But it clings to my thoughts like grease on a pan.

Today, I wonder about the white person sitting next to me on the subway, in the coffee shop, at work. Who did they vote for? Do they see me as human, or as a problem to be solved? America is terrifying because you never know who wants you dead, who tolerates your existence, and who actually gives a damn that you're drowning.

As millions of Americans protest today—No Kings Day, they're calling it—I sit in my dark room, paralyzed by depression's familiar weight. I wanted to march. I wanted to scream. I wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with my people and demand that America remember what it claimed to be. But I didn't go. The quicksand held me down. So instead, I decided to write. To bleed onto the page. To turn my fear into fuel.

This is my protest now. These words. This raw, unfiltered truth that pours from my fingers like a baptism. This post is my love letter to all things gay and Black. This is my middle finger to the orange man and everyone who believes his lies. This is my refusal to be erased.

God has not given me a spirit of fear, though fear visits me daily like an unwanted houseguest. I do not live in this country to live in fear, even though fear is the air I breathe. Today, I choose to live even more audaciously. I rip open my skin, peel back my flesh, expose my beating heart, and pour everything—the rage, the sorrow, the defiance, the love—onto the page.

Your troops are invading cities like occupying forces. Books are being ripped from shelves like they're grenades instead of salvation. Black history is being erased with the same efficiency that slavery tried to erase our names. Even the arts—the one space where we could tell our truths—are under attack. They want to silence the poets, muzzle the dancers, castrate the writers, because they know that art is the most dangerous weapon we have.

This is my war cry. This is my refusal to be silent while they try to make us ghosts in our own country. I stand in spirit with those who are brave enough to march, who are not as crippled by anxiety as I am, who walk in peace while carrying the weight of Martin's dream on their shoulders. I pray that all my ancestors endured—the Middle Passage, the lynchings, the Jim Crow, the AIDS crisis, the murders of Black trans women, the police bullets—is not in vain. I pray that their blood waters the soil of a future where my nephews won't have to write posts like this.

Today, I write naked in truth. Stripped of pretense. Stripped of politeness. Stripped of the mask we wear to make white people comfortable.

NO FUCKING KING. HE IS NOT MY KING.

Here's what they don't understand about quicksand: if you stop struggling, if you spread yourself wide and flat, if you make yourself bigger than the thing trying to swallow you, you can float. You can survive. And if you're lucky—if you're blessed—someone throws you a rope and pulls you to solid ground.

This post is my rope. These words are my solid ground. And you, reading this, feeling this, connecting to this pain and this defiance—you are proof that I am not sinking alone.

We are not crowns for kings to wear. We are not subjects to rule. We are not the conquered.

We are the quicksand. We are the thing that swallows empires whole. We are vast and deep and impossible to escape once you're caught in us. Our resilience is the trap. Our joy is the snare. Our refusal to die is the undertow.

They can try to stand on us, to build their thrones on our backs, but we will pull them under. Not through violence. Not through hate. But through the sheer force of existing, of thriving, of loving each other so loudly that it drowns out their lies.

We shall overcome. Not because we're stronger than the quicksand, but because we learned to become it. To transform the thing that tries to kill us into the thing that saves us.

No kings. No masters. No fear.

Just us. Just this. Just now.

And that, my loves, is enough to start a revolution.

Written from my dark room, where protest looks like putting words on a page and defiance sounds like the clatter of keys. For every Black, brown, queer, immigrant soul who is tired but not defeated. For every ancestor who survived so I could write this. We are still here. We are still fighting. We are still free.

#NoKings #Resistance #BlackQueerJoy #WriteNaked