Obama just walked off the stage, Bruce Springsteen is playing and Oprah Winfrey is crying. I am wiping tears from my own face. My best friends keep calling on the telephone and hearing their voices has never sounded so good. My parents call, I look at the sky and I talk to my dad grandparents and I think about January, what my life will be like just six days after my 24th birthday, less than a week after the birthday of Dr.King.
The first time I voted I was 18 years old and going to college in Ohio, the second time I was 19 and living again in Florida. I cast my vote for Kerry and starry eyed I felt defeated. I collapsed on the floor of the Public Library where I was working, a boy I loved had called me had asked if I was sitting down. When I cried on the ground I could see the Gulf of Mexico, it was November and 80 degrees, the sun was shining and I didn't understand how anything could be okay.
Even though I have lived in New York for the last two years, I did not get residency. I wanted to vote for Florida, and I did in the primary (which did not count) and I did two weeks ago with a ball point pen in my head. I wanted that ballot to represent every soul that ever touched me, my parents moving to this country so that someday they could have a child and their child could have it better than they did. My dead grandparents and great grandparents who never voted because their hands were too bloody, their stomachs to starved.
When anyone talked about this being a landslide victory over the last week, I didn't want to hear. It's not that the faith or the hope wasnt there, but I just wanted to know when I knew. So I kept calling the swing states, making the phones calls to everyone I knew in Florida and Ohio, taking buses to Pennsylvania and meeting people around all this country.
Friday afternoon Oprah looked at her audience as I sat on my couch and she said "Everything is going to be fine America" and I wanted to believe her. But even today my fingers were shaking, my nerves were acting up.
And when I saw on the screen who the president was, I just wept. Everyone was standing and screaming around me, but I just cried. They were happy tears of course, but I could not hold them back, I had no yell in my voice I just felt so much love in my body, so much love in New York and so much love in the other two states that raised me.
I would do it all again a thousand times. I'd have the arguments, I'd spend the hours on the phone, I'd go to your state or mind. I would do it one hundred times.
And I feel like today is a new day for you and me, for The United States, for the world. I want us all to feel the way that we have felt this past years. I want us to keep our hands in it-- to remember that this is ours, that we CAN make a difference that our votes CAN count. From the time I was fifteen years old and I saw my state paralyzed by a recount, I learned to be discontent, I learned to not trust my leaders, I became sarcastic, I rolled my eyes. By 19 I changed my tune while everyone chanted "four more years" around me, on November 3rd my body produced more water than the entire Gulf of Mexico which I saw through the glass windows. in 2006 I turned 21, I took my shots legally for the first time, I decided to get out of Florida, I moved to New York and somewhere in this whole process, I thought we could get it all back.
Now I am 23, alone in Brooklyn and I have never felt so surrounded. I know that we havnet gotten it all back, but we can get what we want. We need to stay involved as much as the people who founded our country did. We need to choose our leaders and help choose our policies, I want to remember everyone that died so I could sit here today and have the luxury of typing this out. I want to remember everyone that died so that men, immigrants, women and all skin colors would have the right to vote. I want us all to remember how we got here, and I don't want to take any of it for granted anymore.
We have the books on our shelves, our appliances on digital, the pen and paper is there somewhere and we spoke out, we spoke out hard and strong and I have never seen such happiness.
I don't want us to ever forget what life has felt like, or what tonight feels like or that tomorrow is up to us, tomorrow we can decide to feel however we want.
And we will tell this to our children, we will tell this to our grandchildren. We will always have this to tell. This is all us.
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