idealistic. you’ve always been this way. reading a little too much into situations, seeing things rosier than they really are, even trusting people or things that are glaringly untrustworthy. who can blame you? it isn’t as if you had much to depend on growing up.

your mom, valencia, was only sixteen when she had your older sister, triniti. teen pregnancies were—and still are—common in harlem, new york. and so were bad fathers. many were absent, and you honestly think you’d both have been better off if yours was too. but he wasn’t. your father, isaiah, was caught up in the streets since he was a kid. and when he knocked up your mom, he convinced himself that he could provide, with drug money, even though he was only 18 himself.

for the first few years, things were okay. your mom was kicked out by her parents for being “fast”, and your father convinced his mom to let them stay. so his childhood bedroom became a half-nursery, half-home. your mom got pregnant again with you, and suddenly there were four. your father was able to manage the rent his mother asked him for every month, but when she died just after your fourth birthday… things became stressful.

valencia and isaiah were kicked out when isaiah’s mother died, and forced to move into another apartment in spanish harlem. the heights. like many people, isaiah was always looking for the quickest ways to make cash. drug runs, deals, back alley trading. it was all dangerous. you wonder if that’s what makes him so angry, so violent and explosive when he’s home. if that’s why the good moments you remember—sitting on his shoulders, laughing over ice cream, being his baby girl—feel more rare.

valencia worked too—safer jobs at the laundromat or daycares—which left little quality time. and left triniti to start taking care of you at the ripe age of 8 years old. by the time she was twelve, you were sleeping in her bed almost every night, and eating breakfast made by her every morning. benefitting from the necessary sacrifice that triniti was forced to make.

it’s been eight years of living in spanish harlem. eight years of surviving arguments between valencia and isaiah, violence, of triniti protecting you the best ways she knows how.