If I close my eyes tight enough then I can have a round table discussion with all of my close childhood friends about what its like to be 33 and to have made it through the torture of oppression and the embarrassment of poverty, to a state of relative economic comfort. It is only when I open my eyes once again that I can see that everyone else that is taking part in the conversation is dead.
This is the cross that I must bear for having the audacity to make it out of the ghetto—otherwise known as the trap—and that is that is that I am forced to look back inside the trap on a daily basis and see the mangled, distorted, and eviscerated bodies of so many of my childhood friends. At times this makes me feel so isolated and so intensely alone, questioning my present state of being while simultaneously wishing that I hadn’t made it out. Sometimes I come to the conclusion that if I were in the penitentiary then I would have more friends and be around more like-minded individuals and if I were dead or crazy then I wouldn’t know this pain.
I am now forced to make it in a world that does not belong to me and represent for a people that have never mattered. They do not matter to the other world and they do not matter to themselves, however, they do matter to me because I am them and they are me. I’m lost out here in this world. I want their conversations back, their spirits back, I want those memories back so I’m always looking back.
I’m never in the present and I don’t value the future. I’m always looking back inside the trap wishing that I could have liberated my loved ones minds before they got caught up.
YB