Looking at my freshly painted toes while my hands rubbed down my face. Tars are now streaming down my face. I shift my eyes to the corner of the bathroom, seeing the 'positive' pregnancy test. The more I thought about the idea of me being pregnant at nineteen makes me internally break down. The more I thought about it, the hotter tears streamed down my face.
My name is Anaja Anessa Norris. I am nineteen years old and currently taking online courses in community college for nursing. I stood at five-foot-six and lived in Bedstuy with my father, his wife and her two children. I was born an only child however never was I a spoiled, entitled individual. I worked for everything that I have today, like my all-black 2017 Honda Civic LX. Growing up in Brooklyn isn't what it's like. I grew up watching my family physically and mentally break apart and become toxic.
I watch my birth mother became abusive with substances like alcohol, cigarette, cocaine, even marijuana. She started this when my grandmother passed about four years prior. My mother, Alasia and my grandmother had the best bond you could imagine. They sat and talked on the phone frequently, we would take trips every other weekend to visit my grandmother. My grandmother was then unfortunately diagnosed with stage four brain cancer.
She had many tumors forming on top of her skull leaving her brain dead when she went to sleep one night. The day mother got that call, I have never seen the same woman I was raised by. My mother stayed out late, spent all her earnings in local bars, she needed something to numb the pain she was going through. She tried staying strong to support her family but feel short when the drug abuse raised. I found her at sixteen snorting cocaine off our kitchen counter one morning,
That was the day I thought I lost my everything. My father walked in right behind me, and he even started crying and ended up in a whole argument. My father only knew of the abuse beforehand, so he could've stopped before she reached the addictive state, she was in. My father has so much love for her, that he let her stay if she promised to him that she would stop.
My mother was unemployed, started to smell like she hadn't washed in weeks. It was a lot to go through. My father thought that he was making progress with her addiction, but we both were sadly mistaken. She was using it right under our noses making us believe she was getting better, but we soon were hit with the reality when we found her in the living room, cold as ice and seized.
She had died.
My plan was always to be like the living, friendly, and healthy woman my mother was before she died. She was in peace and reunited with my late grandmother. I miss them. Looking at this dilemma and rerunning the events that just occurred were put to a stop when I heard his garage door open.
I heard his garage door open making my snap out of my thoughts and scurry to fix this crime scene before he comes up here. I stood at attention immediately and began to pick up the test off the floor and stuff it deep in the sweatpants that I stole from him. I then picked the box up from the sink and put it in the sink drawer in the back.
"Anaja!" he called out for. I wiped moisturizer on my face full of dried away tears as he appeared in his master bedroom bathroom. "Hey baby," I said in a soft voice. Ignoring the fact that I have a living baby inside of me by this man.
Who was the man in front of me? Omari Amiri Jackson, a twenty-year-old, darkskin man. Omari stood at six foot four inches and was everything I looked for in a man. Omari had his dealings in the streets of Brooklyn and even the Bronx and was well-respected.
Omari kept me away from all of nonsense of the street-life and made sure I was straight. I met Omari when I was still in high school around 2 years ago in my sophomore year, I was 16 at the time. He was freshly out of school, and he bothered me like we were siblings. He would come to the school at my lunchtime and force me to go eat with him. I declined of course, at the time I needed someone who had goals for themselves and just wasn't playing in the streets all day.
