BUTTERFLIES I N THE DARK

THE COUNTRY DECIDES

"If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it"

-Mark Twain

One of the major signs of democracy is a country's ability to organise free and fair elections that are appreciated by the people.

I watched it all from the quiet of my private world—the debates, the speeches, the endless flood of ads and promises. On television, the candidates were fighting for something I couldn't quite name, something they all seemed desperate to possess, even if it was built on lies. My father's face loomed in every broadcast, a spectre hovering over this new election, his legacy tainting every word that left the mouths of his opponents. She wondered if he even knew how much of himself he had spilled into the world. How much of him now polluted the air, the very atmosphere they breathed.

The election was a circus—a bitter, predictable circus—and I, as always, was its most silent spectator. Not part of the spectacle, not an audience member either just speaking in my heart. Just the unknown daughter of a man who had shattered every ideal I once held about fairness, power, and hope. I had grown up watching the damage, feeling it in her bones; I had felt how the people felt. The way people looked at her, as if she were an extension of him. The whispers that followed her like a shadow—*that* president's daughter. The unknown child born of scandal and power.

I remembered the first time she had tried to understand what the word "democracy" meant—what it was supposed to be. I had been a child, naïve, believing in the idea of the people choosing. But as I grew older, those illusions died quickly. Democracy, I realized, was a game. A game her father played with ruthless precision. His ambition had been his armour, his people nothing more than pawns.

Now, as I watched the election unfold on every screen and newspaper, it was the same game—just with different players. The candidates who threw their promises into the ring, each one trying to outdo the other with empty rhetoric. They spoke of unity and progress, but I knew better. To them, the future was nothing more than a platform to climb higher. The one who stood at the top would look down on the others and call it "victory," even if it meant stepping over the broken bodies of the people they claimed to represent.

My father had made the same promises once, and like the others, he had delivered nothing. I could hear his voice in the back of her mind, always so sure of himself, always demanding loyalty without ever giving it in return. He had taught me the rules of power early on since I met him—never show weakness, never trust anyone, and never, under any circumstances, admit your own failure.

And yet, as the election grew nearer, there was something new in the air. A tension that vibrated like a taut wire. The people were restless. They were angry. Some of them wanted to tear down what her father had built, to destroy everything he had stood for. Others rallied around him, defending his honor, as if his name still held some kind of sacred weight. I wondered how they could do it—how they could still believe in him, despite everything.

But she knew. I knew better than anyone that loyalty, especially to someone like him, had its price. My had paid that price my whole life. I had seen it in the eyes of the men who bowed before my father, the women who adored him, and the children who idolized him. They had all fallen into his web, and they were too deep now to see the truth. To them, he was a symbol of power, of victory—something to hold onto in a world that was always slipping away.

For me, there was no such delusion. I had seen the ugliness behind the curtains, the manipulation, and the lies. The election, to me, was a cruel reminder that the game of power was never about what it promised—it was about who could survive it. Who could endure the brutal process of rising to the top and staying there long enough to claim victory?

The night before the election, I sat in her father's old study, the room filled with books I would never read, papers I would never touch. I thought about the future, not in terms of politics or power, but in terms of herself. What would I be after this? Would I still be his daughter—the one cursed by his name—or could I finally escape it? Could I find a way to step outside the shadow that had shaped me ever since mum had died?

My father would never acknowledge her role in the grand scheme of things. To him, I was nothing more than a passing mistake, a chapter in the story that never mattered. But as the polls closed, as the results began to trickle in, I felt a strange sense of finality. For all the venom I harboured for him, for everything he had done to her, I realized she was still bound to him in a way that no election could sever.

The world would decide the future, but I would always carry the weight of the past. And in that truth, I found the only power I could ever truly claim—silent, unacknowledged, and hidden in the shadows. But as usual he won and then I realised everyone mattered the haters and the lovers, I remembered what the first lady said "we're family right, we'll be just fine" but are we.