When I realized I was on my own, I was five.
My father was imprisoned and then deported, and though I cannot say I know this, I believe he was killed shortly after his release. I don’t remember him. My mother never recovered, and shortly after, her initial calamity struck. A super deadly painkiller known as crack became widely available to us. My mom jumped in head first and has been numb as Novocaine ever since. This shook up my family dynamic and childhood for the worse.
My older siblings ran and fended for themselves, went to school, got careers, and started their own families. Nobody saw me, though. It became every man for himself, and it still exists today. When I realized I was on my own, I was five.
My mother is an uneducated African woman from the 50s, scared, alone, and unprotected with kids. She was also very addicted to crack, so imagine the company she kept and the things my sister and I saw and regularly encountered. I have been used for sex so many times due to her neglect and stupidity; sex is recreational, transactional, or plain ol’ business to me. She left us around sexually deviant men and irresponsible women who were her so-called friends who rationalized her sick behavior as “getting me ready for them girls.” All I can say is, “Wow, did she ever!”
I was born in 1990 and have been having unprotected sex with anything with a pulse since 1994, whether I wanted to or not. At five, I wandered outside, first the porch, then the curb, across the street, and then I saw “The Corner,” my mind was blown!! I saw illicit sex acts in public. I saw fortune, misfortune, violence, and the thing that would control the next 30 years of my life: street code/gangsterism and the almighty power of the “open-air drug market” that shaped the rules and landscapes of the city of Philadelphia to this very day!
I don’t know whether to call my story a cautionary or precautionary tale or what it is to me, the plain ol’ truth, but I know I tell it to inspire people, period. A chance or opportunity was never affordable to me, especially early on, but I did learn to take what I wanted, and what I wanted wasn’t in another lost black boy’s pocket.
What I wanted was buried in my heart and mind. God sent us to the planet with natural intelligence, humor, perspective, cognitive ability, heart, compassion, passion, strength, and understanding. These qualities lay dormant not because of how I was raised but because I wasn’t raised at all. I just matured with the life around me.
Today, I’m still learning and making mistakes…like getting out of prison in two months with no one and nowhere to go. I’m hoping God chooses now to bless me since we stood so tall through the pain and heartache even when I didn’t want to.
I have no idea how my life will go, but fear does not live in my heart. So, I will face the world again as fearlessly as I always have. I don’t know how to be anything else. I tried to be better. Life doesn’t do anything but close doors to me, but I’m still going to tie my boots tight and fight…I hope one day I’m blessed to win, stay dangerous, and all of you, I’m out. Khalil, Big Wink.
I am being released on November 2, 2024, and I hope you post my story. I pray the engagement helps somebody. It was therapeutic writing it. I don’t have a family or place to go, but I will look you guys up later, God willing. I don’t have any social media or people, you can tell. I have nothing and no one, but hopefully, the universe will bring this back to me with some assistance. In the hopes of getting away from yesterday,
