If I knew what I knew now and could look into a crystal ball to see everything I was going to experience, I would have stayed with Chance. There would’ve been no football player. There wouldn’t have been any of the future pains that I faced with my high school sweetheart, and a lot of bad situations would have been avoided.
Chance was the ideal man for me. He was attractive, smart, and an intriguing person, but I didn’t see his light until my first boyfriend took my heart and shredded it into pieces.
I fell so hard for my first boyfriend. I spent my whole first year of high school chasing him, going to his football games instead of my own school events, and being cooped up in his house. I loved his family, though. When you're thinking long term with a guy, you look into his family and see if it's what you like. If a guy comes from a good family and they instill good values in him, odds are a little better when it comes to having a good man on your hands. And that’s just facts.
My first boyfriend and I started to turn down different paths in our lives. He was heavily into football (which I knew) , but he adapted the lifestyle that big time players get. The idea that a black girl wasn’t good enough, she wasn’t cut out for the life style he was trying to live. I was coming into myself which to people like him is the “crazy, angry, always steering up trouble, non-straight hair without a perm” black girl. I was awakening . However, it was and is always perceived in the stereotypical way.
He even got one of his white female best friends that went down to that private school that he attended to let me down “real easy.” She told me that I wasn’t what he was looking for anymore; I was inadequate. I never really understood what was going on when his mother sent me the long paragraph explaining what athletes go through and how they are trying to “find themselves and figure out what it is they want”.
My Godfather was real with me. I didn’t fit the brand that my first boyfriend was trying to build for himself. He was trying to go D1, and needed a less complex, quieter, less pigmented girl on his side that was going to tolerate mediocrity. Someone who didn’t require a lot of hard loving, or long nights of tears and expressing feelings. He needed someone who was not going to suffer the roads to life and need a strong arm to pick them up because that arm was going to be used as some D1 team’s starting center in the Fall of 2016.
SO, I waved goodbye to him at the last football game. It was the second week of 10th grade and I never looked back again. It took me 5 months to get over him. The first night, I grew sick, threw up over his name. My mind could not handle rejection because it wasn’t something my father did to me (yet). I thought I was the top of the line negra, invisible, irresistible to the eye. But even black don’t recognize the beauty of its color, because it has too many complex shades of its own.
