NURSE TO CLINTON – BELIEF ISN'T INHERITANCE

I grew up sideways.

Not wrong. Just tilted.

My father, Brian, wore the uniform. Duty stitched into his collar. He came and went like weather.

A relative on his side tended to a president. Nurse to Clinton. That's a sentence most people don't get to say.

So my childhood held strange rooms.

Air Force One.

I remember the hum. The blue seats. The quiet power of a plane that didn't feel like a plane.

A child doesn't understand history. A child just feels it in the carpet.

There are photos. Clinton holding me. My small body against a big moment.

I look at them now like they belong to someone else.

Somewhere there's a baseball bat. Signed. Given.

I don't know where it is.

That's the thing about symbols. You keep them until you don't.

The bat is gone. The story stays.

I was raised blue.

It was the water I swam in. The default. The given.

But belief isn't inheritance.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped nodding.

The party that raised me stopped feeling like mine. The fit loosened. Then it fell off.

I needed room to make things. To create without apology.

For me, that room opened on the other side.

I joined the GOP.

Not with noise. With a slow exhale.

This isn't a manifesto.

It's just the truth, laid flat.

I grew up sideways. I straightened toward what set me free.

And I'm still looking for that bat.

-Mitchell “Royel” Abbott