Bubbles Don't Break: My Political Love Affair with Zohran

Zohran Mamdani

This morning I woke to clouds pressed against my window like gray palms, the George Washington Bridge stretching its steel arms through the mist. Coffee—bitter, beautiful, necessary—sent steam curling toward the ceiling, awakening something fierce in me. The city breathes below, eight million hearts beating in discord, while above us all, that orange specter sits in his marble tower, deciding our fates with the casual cruelty of a child pulling wings from flies.

I live suspended here, floating in my liberal bubble through the arteries of Manhattan. My neighborhood pulses with galleries and coffee shops where conversations bloom like wildflowers after rain—discussions of Rothko and revolution, of poetry and politics, all swimming together in the sweet symphony of like minds. But even here, even in this sanctuary of progressive thought, the shadow reaches. Staten Island votes red. Queens bleeds purple. The bronx holds its breath. And I, like some fairy-tale sorceress, drift through it all, untouched but not unaware.

November hangs heavy in the air, thick with possibility and terror. I share walls with strangers because the dream of creating art in this concrete cathedral demands sacrifice—my privacy, my savings, my sanity sometimes. But still I stay, chasing the ghost of becoming, the phantom of being seen. Teaching pays the bills but feeds nothing deeper. The stage calls. The gallery walls whisper. The book that lives in my chest pounds against my ribs, demanding birth.

And then there is him—Zohran Mamdani—cutting through the political fog like lightning through storm clouds. Not the love that makes you foolish, but the love that makes you believe again. Young, brilliant, burning with the kind of righteous fire this city needs. He is my political Superman, cape billowing with the winds of change, eyes that see through the bullshit to the bone-deep truth of what this city could become. When he speaks about housing, I hear the voice of every artist crammed into overpriced closets, every teacher choosing between groceries and rent. When he talks about healthcare, I see my queer family finally breathing easy, no longer rationing insulin or love or the basic human right to exist without apology.

This man—audacious enough to dream in color while everyone else speaks in the gray language of compromise—makes me remember what it feels like to be ungovernable. He doesn't just propose policy; he weaponizes hope. Each press conference is a love letter to the dispossessed, each rally a resurrection service for dreams we thought were buried under decades of "that's just how it is." I watch him on my phone screen and feel something prehistoric wake up in my chest—the part of me that remembers when politics was about transformation, not just transaction.

In him I see the future I've been praying for: fresh policies for the housing crisis that bleeds us dry, protection for the arts that give this city its soul, recognition that queerness is not negotiable—it is human. He speaks and I remember what hope tastes like, sweet and sharp on the tongue, dangerous and necessary as first love.

But then comes the ghost of power past, shuffling back into frame. Andrew Cuomo, once fallen, now rising again like some political phoenix who missed the memo about staying dead. I watched him fall and felt something twist in my chest—not joy, but the complex grief of watching power consume itself. His hands, once steady on the wheel, had wandered where they shouldn't, and the reckoning was swift and merciless.

Now he returns, and I taste metal in my mouth. The fear that his resurrection will split the vote, that his white-haired entitlement will eclipse the young fire we so desperately need. Democrats line up behind him like mourners at a funeral, grieving for the old ways, the familiar failures, the comfortable corruption of business as usual. They cannot see what I see from my floating perch—that sometimes love means letting go, that sometimes wisdom means stepping aside.

"Concede," I whisper to my coffee cup, to the morning air, to the universe that seems hellbent on repeating its mistakes. "Sit your old whiteness down." There is so much he could do from the shadows—fundraising, organizing, passing the torch with grace instead of clutching it with bloodied knuckles. But ego burns brighter than wisdom, and pride tastes sweeter than sacrifice.

The city spreads below me, a living organism of dreams and desperation. I have claimed it after twenty-six years of paying rent to belong, of building roots in concrete, of learning to love the smell of subway steam and the sound of sirens singing. This is my home, purchased not with blood but with persistence, not with birthright but with the simple audacity of staying.

My bubble drifts higher, carrying me and my political crush toward some uncertain future. Will we survive the coming storm, or will we burst against the sharp edges of reality? Will fresh ideas finally take root, or will we remain trapped in the amber of what was, what always has been?

I write these words because silence is complicity, because neutrality is violence, because sometimes the only weapon we have is truth spoken plain. My heart pounds against the thin membrane of hope, and I wonder if bubbles were meant to float forever, or if they exist precisely because they are so beautifully, tragically temporary.

The bridge holds steady in the distance, connecting one shore to another, built by hands that understood that sometimes the greatest act of creation is learning to span the impossible space between what is and what could be. And here I float, suspended between earth and sky, between fear and hope, between the city I love and the future we're all afraid to name—waiting to see if morning will bring wings, or if gravity will finally remember my address.