Ahmadiyah

There are so many voices inside of me they wanna’ come out, they wanna’ be free. They would like to get out and skip about collect my thoughts cause confusion and doubt. But God has something better for me so the visions I have I will no longer see. He will guide me out to see my way and place me on my healing days.

So today I serve my eviction notice and tell my voices I’m no longer lonesome. Liberate myself to manifest and becoming free. Autumn sunrises has always had some sort of effect over me after inter-mingling with those late summertime breezes, the smell of the fresh baked breads from the neighborhood corner bakery. Mother’s out hanging laundry up in the court yards of the early sun. Taking pride and care before the cloths lines began to be filled up by others who had no respect or regards to how their cloths was being hung.

Misery seems to always enjoy company in the projects that I lived in as they began to enjoy the daily gossip and whispers about what so and so had going on the evening before. As I sat and listened to the hollow laughter and the sounds of those who rose early to begin their work day, my thoughts would begin to drift, deep embedded wounds will always continue to haunt me. I would play my grandmothers words over and over again in my mind. “If anything other than birth happens to this child, you had better get as far away from me as possible”.

These are the words my grandmother said as my mother was leaving out on a gurney filled with blood stained sheets. My mother looked up and rolled her eyes and said “I don’t want it”. She walked toward her and placed her hand upon my mother’s belly and said, “The next time you need to learn to keep your legs closed, she didn’t ask to be here”. As beads of sweat rolled from her forehead she thought, “This child is going to be the death of me”. Pain struck through her stomach. She was paralyzed with the thought that the wire hanger that she hid that she tried to use to abort me had failed, again.

In spite of whichever challenge she put me through, I made it two months early with my eyes wide open and for this my grandmother named me Ahmadiyah. It means “Gods’ endurance” she said that I was a fighter and that my being born with a veil was going to make my tiny life just a little bit different. We lived in a small four room house across from a cemetery which was shared by six family members, my grandmother; grandfather, my mother, and three small cousins belonging to my grandmother’s oldest son Michael.

Being a heroin addict, he could never keep his shit together so before the ink was even dry you were able to understand that it had just been about the welfare that he would be able to receive from the state because my grandmother never seen a dime. My grandmother had said that “Birds of a feather flock together” because he had long run off with a woman from another town leaving behind nothing but his silhouetted shadow and stench of his own selfishness. Our living quarters were so small I had been placed inside of an old vintage dresser drawer not having the room for another bed….

To Be Continued