A Necessary Struggle

The beginning

The day has expired, and I am left with the loneliness of the night. Night equals isolation for me. No footsteps, no heartbeat; just the sounds of the rodents who stake the same claim to this hellish squalor that I am forced to occupy. I would go to grandma's, but that is a forgotten place now. Nothing was forgotten about the comfort and love I felt at grandmas, but what was forgotten was my way back to Georgia where Grandma lived. When my mother and I left in the middle of the night and headed to Philly, I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye. I retreated to this bando for refuge. It's been three days since my mother left with that stranger she claimed was her friend.
The last time Mother left with a so-called friend, she was gone for the whole night returning with a huge black eye that she said occurred from falling on her face which caused her to lose consciousness and be left alone to wake up in an unknown place. "What would be her story this time," I mused. She left me here with nothing but hunger and loneliness. And being it's the dead of the summer, foul odors and flies are as relevant as this leaky roof and the cardboard that covers the decaying window frames. She said "Hey baby. Be a big boy and go in that house until I come back. I won't be long, I promise" I open the door. The darkness stops me. "Boy hurry up in go inside before one of these nosey neighbors see you". With the encouragement of my mother's words, I entered the doors and became one with the darkness.
The Darkness that I was so freighted of was now my savior. At night, strangers would enter. I would find a spot in the darkness and become invisible to the people who use my dwelling for a place to have sex, do drugs, and even as a bathroom. At the age of twelve, I was more afraid of the outside than I was of this drug den that been my home for the past 3 days. Food and water were now like winning the lottery, and seeing my mother come through the darkness would be like seeing Jesus Christ. At my young age, those three days felt like months. Every day I spent in this boarded up house, I would lose a piece of my being. Any residual inner goodness I had was rotting away. My fears and the innocence that I held were both washed away like chalk on a hot asphalt street. The rain hitting the hot surface sent steam leaking through the concrete.
The steam was filled with my fear and innocence. Thinking the worst wasn't something I had the option of doing. Being surrounded by, filth, drugs, and every bodily fluid that a human could produce had buried any positive outlook I had, which made it easier for me to accept a reality in which food and water were a dream. One in which seeing my mother again was like asking for the power to fly.
By day four, I no longer thought about food or water, as something out of my reach. Nor did I want or need my mother cutting through this darkness to come to rescue me. My reality catalyzed a metamorphosis within me. I will no longer fear the outside. It can't be worse than this hut where I'm secluded from a world in which I only hear people's voices.
Now it was time for me to put faces to these voices.
I step outside into the sun, which was still reaching its apex for the day. It shot light in my eyes, distorting my vision as I tumbled down the marble-patterned steps. When I made my way to the street, my vision was no longer a prisoner of the sun glare. My vision was now a prisoner of a world that God didn't know existed. For if he knew this waste ground existed, he's not God. He's the Devil imitating God. I instantly realize I was just in a bigger forsaken house. The dungeon I spent four days in was just a mini version of the streets I was now one with. A place where everything was for sale and everybody was selling something.
One boy my age was selling a remote-controlled car that was missing the antenna and the left-back tire. A well older man was selling a necklace that made his hands look even more forsaken. A Young lady, wearing barely any was selling her skills and services to anybody who had twenty dollars. Every corner was decorated by young broken men and the trash from the drugs and food that would help make an early grave. And make room for the kids of my generation. To become the new decorations for the corner stores. "Should I run back to the crack den and seek the darkness that turns into my Savior?" Or would the poverty eventually kick down the beaten door, taking away my darkness, leaving me no place to hide?
But I no longer wanted to hide. Or being forever hungry. So what my future entails is predictable. I'm thankful to my mother for making me go inside that bando and leaving me there. Living in Georgia all my life and mother being an absent parent made me a piglet in a slaughterhouse didn't prepare me for the faces that carry the voices I heard my first four days in the spoiled dwelling that I made my home. In turn, my Ultimate savior was that hellish pit.
I was no longer a piglet in a slaughtered house. I was more a Chameleon. Adapting to a cold world where a 12-year-old had to be his own savior.