DOWN 4 REAL

ONE

The day I met Eric was a day that I believe changed my life forever.

It was September of 1984, I had graduated high school months prior. My alarm clock woke me up early that morning and the sun had began to make its presence known over the tides of the Pacific Ocean when I found myself exiting my hometown. A smile had formed along my lips as I looked over the horizon, the sky was transitioning from a light shade of purple into a bright yellow and it looked nothing short of beautiful.

Usually, at this time of the day, the city sky would resemble a big white blanket due to the clouds the Ocean had pushed over us. Seeing a change in the atmosphere brought a sense of warmth that I only felt when thinking about my city.

San Francisco, California. A place of charisma and hustle, and just enough amounts of ghetto to keep everyone who lived here grounded. I was born here, I stepped into my womanhood here—I experienced so many first-time occurrences in this city that shaped me into the woman I was growing to be. There was no greater place in my eyes.

However, that's how I felt about the region where I lived, in general. The bay area was a place of great diversity, like a melting pot for so many cultures and ethnic backgrounds to live side by side in harmony. At least a great amount of the time things were harmonious. Every place has its flaws, but the bay area as a whole was more open-minded than the rest of the country at the time.

The city was rampant with businesses lining almost every block. Everyone had something to do and somewhere to be. I was born in a small neighborhood on the edge of San Francisco that was fairly quiet compared to the rest of the city, but we still had lots of movement happening around us. I remember walking past the many establishments throughout the years with my mother, her grip tight on my little hand as our heels clicked against the concrete.

My mother was an impulsive woman—I used to think she was spoiled when I was a child, but I had grown to realize that my mother was quick to put her foot down so she could leave unjust situations. Her attitude oozed of confidence and charisma, beautifully accenting her already ethereal appearance. My mother was one of San Francisco's hidden beauties within its many ghettos. She had rubbed her gritty and tough ways onto me, yet showed me how to execute those emotions in the gentlest way possible. My mother and I were fairly close, she vowed to give her life to me at an early age and our relationship reflected that.

I remember us moving around frequently as a kid. She would never tell me why we were always moving or why she would almost never be home after school was out, but I had already figured it out on my own by the age of six.

I never knew my father, I had seen him only a handful of times in my young life. He was a white man from the south and my mother told me his family disowned him for being in a relationship with a black woman. My mother made him choose between her and his family, and my father apparently chose to be with his family. I hated my father for it, he was a coward and a bastard in my eyes. To be bold enough to lie with a woman and conceive a child, but stupid enough to leave her alone at the hospital over 1,000 miles away.

I never internalized my father being absent from my life, my mother was still able to provide for me and let me live a happy childhood. I wasn't missing out on anything, I thought. I had grown to be a respectable young woman, I was never chasing around men or being fast in that sense. My mother raised me to the best of her abilities and I turned out to be her most proudest gift.

I saw how the capitalist society ruined my mother's perception of reality. What a hard and honest worker my mother was, in my eyes there was no one who worked as hard as she did. I just hated how honest she was while working for places that did not honor her integrity and moral compass. She sacrificed so many things to be able to work, one of those things being her relationship with her parents.