Last night, the news broke the way bad dreams do—already mid-stride, already screaming. Venezuela, an attack, a president taken in the dark and pulled out of the frame like a chair from under a body. I watched it unfold on mute first, because I’ve learned that sound makes things feel truer than I’m ready for. The crawl of headlines did enough damage on its own.
They say kidnapped, but that word is too cinematic, too clean. It implies a plan with a beginning and an end, a ransom note folded carefully into a pocket. What I saw looked more like a rupture. Like a country inhaling and forgetting how to exhale.
I keep wondering what happens to a man when the title is stripped away. President, one moment, inventory number the next. Do they still call him Señor Presidente when the door shuts, or does language strip faster than clothing? Power is such a loud costume; I imagine the silence afterward is unbearable.
MDC New York keeps intruding on my thoughts—not because I know it, but because I know of it. Concrete, fluorescent light that never quite turns off, time measured in counts and trays and footsteps. I picture him there not as a symbol but as a body: learning which noises mean nothing and which mean trouble, negotiating sleep with a ceiling that does not care who you used to be. Does he replay speeches in his head like lullabies? Does he still argue with the ghosts of advisers who are no longer required to answer?
I tell myself I’m thinking about this as a journalist, that this is the muscle memory of my trade flexing on its own. But the truth—one of them, anyway—is that I’m always drawn to the moment when myth collapses into routine. When history trades its grand verbs for smaller ones: wait, eat, stand, sit. Survive.
It also scares me how quickly cages start to feel imaginable. How a president can become a prisoner overnight, and how the rest of us rehearse that possibility quietly, privately, as if practicing a fire drill for the soul. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop refreshing the page. Maybe that’s why I keep writing instead of sleeping.
Somewhere between Caracas and New York, between rumor and record, a man is learning the weight of a door closing. And somewhere here, with a cup gone cold beside me, I’m wondering—again—how thin the membrane really is between the story we tell about power and the room where power goes to sit down.