Confronting the past.

I officially left home when I was 17 years old. It wasn't an ideal situation. For all intents and purposes I was a high school drop out, I had no money, I had no job and worst of all, I had a pretty nappy fro. Seriously. It was pretty atrocious.

After drifting for a couple of days I met up with a guy who was more of a friend of a friend at the time. We'll call him C. C and I we were both in the preparatory program at our high school together and we both had done everything in our power to not avail ourselves of that opportunity. Even still, I wouldn't say that C and I were close at that time as we had come to know each other at a time when I was still struggling with who I was as a person, while C was always a popular, confident kid. Nevertheless we still had several mutual friends and maintained a cordial relationship at best.

Even still, C would invited me into his house where I ended up living for several months. I consider C one of my dearest friends today. His family didn't have a lot to go around. I slept on the floor under my jacket initially and under a sheet eventually. They still took me in like one of their own and I never forgot that. Today I meet people and half the time I'm convinced they want to talk to me because I have a good job or I work in an organization they want to know more about.

Back Then? LoL. Not quite. I had nothing to offer them. I could have died or ended up in prison and nobody would have batted an eyelash. It's not exactly newsworthy when a poor black kid falls through the cracks on the South side of Chicago. Yet, they still offered me a hand. That's some real shit.




Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago: I get a facebook message from C's little brother. As a way of background, C's little brother is a 21 year old felon with a fiance and a kid. He just moved to Iowa because that's the only place he knew he could go and was living in a shelter. He wants help. He can't get a job and he doesn't know how he's gonna keep it together for his shorty. So what do I do? The odds are that he'll probably be back in jail in a matter of months. Even if he has the motivation to do something different it's not likely that he has the knowledge or the background to really pull himself up over the cliff that he walked off a long time ago. If I'm going to help him I gotta be like a father, teacher, shrink and guidance counselor all in one. Meanwhile, I'm working a 7am to 10pm job on top of everything else that I have going on. I don't have time for this shit.

But can I turn my back on him? I can only imagine what I looked like sleeping on that floor underneath a windbreaker with a nappy ass afro. You would have been going out on a limb to say I wouldn't be a statistic then and you might have been committed if you told someone I'd be where I am today. I learned a long time ago that you couldn't let the past consume you or you'd never make it through the present to the future.  I'm sure I could justify just chalking it up, but could I live with myself if I didn't spend the time/money to at least try?

The past is a bitch I guess.

I have no ending to this post. I don't know what I wanted to accomplish by writing this, but I just wanted to put what I was thinking out there. Maybe an appropriate conclusion will come to me later.