This is the way that I love to write…

Dear Anonymous,

I texted you on Saturday morning, asking if what you had said to me the night before was really real. Still waiting on that response. Staring at my phone from 7 to 9 has made me think about it more AND MORE AND MORE and I cannot keep sitting here like this. Do you understand that what you said hurt? Then you expect me to wait a whole night while you make your mind up? No. That’s why I’m writing you this letter.

You said what you said, but would you still be saying that if you remembered how much fun we had everyday after school? You used to take my hand and sit with me on the train all the way to my house, miles away from your own, because you told me you wanted to see me get home safe. Remember that? Remember when we were walking to my front door and I introduced you to my friends down the block? They said you were cute. And they wondered how someone like you could actually be real, nice enough to look after my safety before your own. You would walk alone from my door to the train and go back downtown before your father or grandmother called you, wondering where you were. Your program missing you. You were very much like Ferris Bueller that way. Those were the days I couldn’t help but think about all night.

When was the last time you thought about that? Or, when was the last time you thought about that picture you drew for me? The one that had all the clean line work, as if it took you a year to make. You handed that to me on a Wednesday, the same day I told you I would have a song written for you, about you, that I would sing to you. I’m sorry I didn’t sing it. I’m sorry I choked and couldn’t find enough courage in me to bring it. I’m sorry you were so excited and I completely ruined the feeling. At least I made it up when I sung it to you that evening. You know the day we couldn’t find a place to sit? Somebody was already on that bench in the garden you showed me last summer, so we walked around and sat outside in the courtyard of a church. You’re not religious, neither am I, but it felt like that’s where we were meant to be. With your head laying on me, I didn’t have to stare into your eyes and sing, you told me I could look away and smiled. That big smile you had lit up the concrete. Are you telling me to look away again, now?

I can’t now. You gave me food and fed my mind with stories of great men and women who taught you every single thing you know. The fact that you could remember them all by name was so sweet; as if you never wanted them to go. Don’t you remember that time you didn’t want me to leave, but my mother was calling me and said I had to go take care of somebody precious? You understood. You let me go. But why not keep me close now that nobody else needs me? Why choose this moment to tell me that you’ll think about it and tell me when the sun rises? Well, it rose hours ago and I’ve heard nothing from your end. Do you see that I’m scared? You are the kind of person who can intimidate a shark in blood filled waters. You set your life on the line to save a woman underground when a man tried to hurt her, and in that moment you became the protector I always knew you would be for us.

When was the last time you thought about the way my hands shake when I’m sad? When was the last time you held them in yours and laughed at me for being over dramatic, knowing full well that I would only laugh with you if you said that? Do you even remember the day I couldn’t stand to look myself in the mirror and made a bad situation worse by yelling at the people I cared about? It wasn’t because I wanted them to feel my pain, it was because they never could; I tried to scream it into them. But with you I didn’t have to scream. I never raised my voice at you, and you never did with me. So, why?

Why haven’t you gotten in touch? Why is the feeling that I’m feeling saying I’m not enough? Why is the present I bought you on a shelf catching dust? How come in order to reach you, I have to deal with this frustration and temptation to call you out on a bluff? And catch a train or a bus up to your house in a rush?

Knock the door down in one kick and run to your room and assume that the only reason you haven’t spoken is this: you died and left me sitting there, phone in a fist, waiting on a response while I’m fuming and pissed. I love being in your room but come on with all this. You should know that we respond to one another real quick. 

But you’re acting like the sun hasn’t risen. Hurry up and answer me, you know my mind is a prison. I can’t wait to hear your answer and hope that “No” isn’t it. But this is killing me more than when we argue and spit. I’d rather go back to the old times, when we sat and talked. Wrote poems in the dirt and on walls when it’s dark. When we walked around the neighborhood caught up in the thought of one another, no better treasure than loving you brought.

So there it is, that’s my mind on a paper. Sorry it’s ten miles long and more hurried writing than actual fluent written script with meaning, class, and elegance but that’s the way my mental is when I can’t deal with mental images and you being a recluse while the reality of us ending is the only thing I’m witnessing. Look at me speaking gibberish. Just hit me up before the sun sets.

 Love,

2014-2016

My older siblings were just like all others in the sense that they were annoying most times and really made me, the baby of the family, all jealous of their “elderliness.” Trademark. I was subjected to the torture of watching tv shows where I didn’t understand the jokes yet, and listening to songs where everything had to be bleeped when I was around. But one thing that I was never told, by them, that I couldn’t do was play video games. 

My early childhood was jam packed with all different kinds of video games that one could imagine. The earliest memories of video games that I have are playing Halo in the eldest brother’s room in New Jersey; Stan definitely had a good eye for first person shooters. Along with that, we had an old Nintendo 64 console that we always used to play the original Mario Kart (still the best version), James Bond Goldeneye, WWF Wrestling, Mario Party, etc. That console brought everybody together just like in the commercials. We had this thing for years and competed against one another every weekend in each game all throughout my childhood.

Eventually it was just my brother and I, as all of our siblings had gotten older and moved back over to Jersey with their mom and her family. It was a sad transition to leave just my brother Tyler and I but we made the best of it. Now we didn’t have to share the game in fours, but between the two of us. What we did with this new setup was we would alternate between one another in games like Call of Duty, Halo 2, 3, ODST, and 4, Saints Row 2, 3 and 4, and so on and so on. Our weekends were fun filled with completing the games’ campaigns in under a certain amount of hours, trying to outdo one another. It became the norm for our room to be the loudest room in the house for hours on end. 

Something my older brother and I had to really learn to do was cooperate when it came to games we both loved. Overwatch was the newest game we had bought that enticed the both of us evenly. We put days of sleep deprived effort into becoming the best that we could be in the game, better than any pro player we followed online. Our skill in the game became incredibly respectable, and seeing as how we shared a single account, our joined level was something most impressive. We argue at times about who gets to play as soon as we get home first but beyond that we work as a team to destroy all competition. That’s not just for Overwatch, but in every game we played we tried to push the other person to be better, something we had missed out on in a house of four boys who were always in constant competitive mode; plus a sister who was indifferent and just played. To this day I can unleash a competitive side that many people I’ve known in my life have told me is the reason I’m difficult to play with, as I would get carried away and every game became a test of psychology.

Today I’m more tame with my burning unrest for triumph, and I just enjoy the game, whatever it may be.

A lot of people will introduce themselves and say “I’m from Philly.” Sure.. they may be from around there, from some small town that we true Philadelphians don’t even know exists and only pass through if we’re going to another actual city. It is totally harmless to say that but I gotta say it. I’m actually from there, I can name the streets and tell you exactly where to go if you want to see the night life. My shoes have tasted the asphalt in the north, south, east, and west, and if you’re from there, you know that each of those are their own place entirely.

The north side has a certain vibe to it that reminds you of a sleepy town. When I say north I mean Cheltenham, which is the town north of us, but the areas around there like Mt. Airy and West Oak Lane don’t make too much noise which gives the people from there no real space to speak on the hardships of neighborhood “activities.” The truth of the matter is, there’s north but then there is North, where the houses are dilapidated and people can tell you that they’ve seen violence like nothing you can imagine. People from around here are known for being extra rough, with good reason. You have to be made of something tough to not get knocked down.

The east side is lumped in with north, as anything on the northern side of Spring Garden street (in the middle of the city) is considered north, which includes east. The south side of the city is broken up into a couple categories. Anything on the south of city hall, from Market street to South street, is the downtown area. Downtown is where everybody comes together to make noise and hang around after work and school lets out. You can find a place to chill while watching a myriad of faces and personalities pass you by. This is where I lived, and there’s no place I’d rather be honestly because the city has a way of creeping into your mind and becoming an extension of your general knowledge about the world. 

Beyond South street you have neighborhood characterized by the majority of ethnic groups that live within them. The Italian Market on 9th street is everything you’d expect to see in a 1950s movie about Italians upholding their own businesses. A good number of Latinos live in the area, which makes the sounds of the area so sweet as you take in the Spanish beats and Raggaeton along with the melodies of Italian opera still played by the elderly in the street. In a one mile radius you can hear the familiar sounds of Black kids encouraging one another to sing “like you mean it,” children younger than 5 speaking Italian that makes them sound like theater poets, and Latino teens who are as rowdy as they are talented in any style of dance you can think of. I used to go on long walks during the weekends in these areas just to take in something other than the loud pounding of city dwellers.

 Far down south and you come across people of all races simply trying to mind their own business. Crime and poverty runs all around the city, as it does everywhere, but in the south it’s amplified. The people are just as numbed to it as those in the north. But the real danger comes in when you step into southwest. Now, anybody from Philly will understand that southwest is the last place a tourist would want to find themselves. It’s the badlands, not to be confused with the Spanish Badlands in the northeast. The people in southwest have this thing where everything is a fight for survival; it’s very common to hear the sounds of bullets flying or to see any variety of gang related crimes being committed no matter what time of day. I don’t like to go there, but my girlfriend and our friend Aicha could attest that nobody wanted to be there any longer than they had to be.

West is where everything happens. It seems like when there is a party going on, it’s in west. If somebody you just met shakes your hand and immediately puts on large headphones to avoid talking to you further, they’re from west. If you go to school downtown and you catch the el train, you’re either looking across the tracks at all the people going westbound looking as if their lives are about to take off, or you’re heading that way knowing that you’re probably going to see every friend you’ve ever met on the journey.

I’ve allowed myself to divulge many different point of my life that, I hope, are entertaining to read about. But, life isn’t all positive, the realities of daily toils and lifelong undertakings come with a particular weight known as grief. I’ve felt a kind of grief that children shouldn’t be introduced to, not when everything seems to be going so well around them. A few friends of mine were very open about their desires, and I use that word as literally as possible, to end their own lives because of different things taking place in them. To conserve anonymity, I’ll replace the name of particular person with a pseudonym while still telling the story as accurately as I can.

It was in the 8th grade that my best friend at the time, Alyssa, would come to school trudging below a cloud as dark as onyx. Her eyes were always so tired. I asked her multiple times about what sorts of things were going on at home but she wouldn’t tell me, which was understandable. On one day in particular, she hadn’t come to the second or third period classes and it made me very anxious to think about where she could’ve gone. Call it intuition or a lucky guess, but I went down to the nurse in search of her and found her laying in one of the beds around the corner, out of site from the nurse. She had tears streaming from her eyes.

 She turned to me when she felt my weight on the foot of the bed and sighed aloud, “I just don’t know.”

From there the conversation went down a number of winding paths related to the drama she faced at home and how her life at school was nothing more than a method of escape. Her fears regarding her home life were being amplified by her parents not communicating effectively, on top of her own feelings of neglect and sorrow. The way she looked at me while revealing her scarred arms is something you remember throughout the years. I took her hands and spoke about the good times we had, trying my best to alter her mood. Eventually, a natural, eye squinting laugh erupted from her when we started telling inside jokes and you could feel a new energy take place in the room. She told me more and more about her problems but I’m guessing that since the tension had been cut a little she was able to tell me while still smiling. Her words were more reflective than emotional, as if she saw the situation she was facing as a story.

The only thing that mattered at the time was that she smiled; when you really know someone and know how they think, seeing them smile if they’re upset becomes a good sign. For Alyssa, knowing she’s the kind of person who uses her smile to cover the pain, in those moments it was actually genuine. She gave me a hug and said something that stuck with me since: “I needed to tell somebody. Just some soul.” 

Just some soul willing to listen and engage. We often are caught up in the words of the person speaking that we become silent and notably stuck, which isn’t what the other person wants. They need love and care, a person who feels honored that they opened up for them and spoke the truth. She hadn’t had a person like that come along yet, as far as I knew, so to be her best friend at the time and be the receiver of such emotion was very much an honor for me. As a result, our friendship was a lot stronger and the new inside jokes were very harsh (the kinds you can’t say out loud). We had an understanding that we could joke about these sorts of things because humor helps to ease the pain.

In May of my 11th grade year, I had one particular night that changed me. The thoughts that burned themselves into my mind nearly caused me to fall victim to my own hand. I had a desire, a craving, to die. Hours passed and all I could do was convince myself not to get out of bed because I knew that if I did it would have ended badly. Against that even still, I hurried to the bathroom, trying to focus on the reality of the situation saying, “Nakoa, this is just your mind. Let it go, let them go, leave it alone.” My obsessive thoughts were flooding to the forefront of my mind in an attempt to break me. They’ve always been there, but on this night they had an agenda to overtake every level headed thought I made to combat them.

What it feels like, if you’ve never been there, is like hot water being poured onto your mind. This is the best description I can give while still trying to be as positive about the experience as possible. It persisted for a long time. And then, there was a single thought that came to mind that seemed to steal center stage like a loud opera singer who has absolutely nothing holding them down. My girlfriend’s face. Her eyes, her effortless laughter, the way she looks when we walk side by side through the streets of Philadelphia. I pictured all the fun times we had together. All the silly moments as well as the ones where we could just sit and exist with one another. Then I thought, “Am I ready to let that go?” Suddenly, I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone so that I could look at all of our pictures and videos from the time before we were dating until then. And you know what? I was nowhere near ready to give that up. I told my obsessive thoughts to sit the fudge down and shut up, Vicky was way more important than they were!

Obviously she cried when I told her about the whole ordeal the next day. She hugged me so tight that I almost died just from the pressure; it was so sweet. We talked everything out in way more detail than I can offer here. Her perception of what had taken place was that she hadn’t done enough to keep me happy prior to this, but the opposite was true. To this day I tell her that she’s the reason I overcame that sensation and that I will always be grateful for that. The way that I was able to help Alyssa when she needed someone was the way Vicky did, in my opinion, and she didn’t even need to be there. She’s my person, that soul that I have alongside me in all my hard times who would stop what she’s doing in a heartbeat to see if I’m okay. And that is the product of the dark.

It would be a lie to say I haven’t had a few more conversations like the one I had with Alyssa. I’ve known people who shroud their faces in smiles who, in reality, would give it all up if it meant escaping the tyrannical grips of hardship. My advice to them all was the same: Clearly you could end it all. But then that would be the end. And that is a terrible way to end a book, isn’t it? Accept the fact that life is hard. Life will always be hard. But it isn’t hard on you, it’s hard on us all. People will always face something that knocks them down but you have a choice whether or not to let it stay wrapped around you. Accept that what has happened has happened, it won’t change. You either let it crush you or you lift it above your head and you throw it. Throw it far.

Also, there have been times when I, and others around me, have said that if you need to talk to someone but don’t know who, talk to anyone who would demonstrate the patience needed to listen. I’ve sat on the bus talking to elderly people about different things in my life as well as theirs, and there is a simple beauty to those interactions that provide perspective. You start to see that everyone has been through their own battles. Talking them out with people, whether in your home or in public, does help your mind make sense of it. For all those people who I’ve sat with only once in my life yet have shared those deep conversations with, I say thank you and may you always remember that somebody cared to listen.

Today, I see Alyssa from time to time and we follow each other on Snapchat. She’s a very talented dancer and actor, always filled with energy when she posts a dance routine. Her life has moved in its own direction, away from the threat of self termination and far superior to the place that it once was in, and I couldn’t be happier for her. That day, when her message reached into my heart, I put away a lot of my own worries in order to be the kind of person that anyone could approach. I decided to provide a shoulder to cry on for anyone in need. And that’s the beauty of these dim situations we face in our youth. If you focus on how dark things seem, you’ll never give your eyes the opportunity to adjust and see the cracks of light from far away. But if you dedicate time to speak on your worries, be that kindhearted person anyone can come to, you become the light.