'Breadlines And Ballrooms'

[sop]

"The East Wing is gone."

"Not under renovation. Not being restored. Gone. Flattened. Half the White House, erased as if it never mattered. I stared at that photo—dust clouds rising where history once stood—and something inside me split open. It wasn’t shock, not really. It was grief. A hollow kind of heartbreak that starts in the gut and crawls up your throat until it’s hard to breathe."

"That picture ripped something out of me. It cut my feet from under me because I never expected it. None of us did. He never even mentioned it. When he first brought it up over the summer, he promised he wouldn’t touch the existing structure. But there it was—gone. The place where generations believed the best of us could gather, bulldozed for a monument to his ego. A ballroom for no one but him."

"He said he wouldn’t touch it."

"He lied. Of fucking course he lied."

Essay continued at link:

https://open.substack.com/pub/jojofromjerz/p/breadlines-and-ballrooms?r=r38w4&utm_medium=ios