My 'Nam'
Banging on the walls, screaming, yelling, and crying around where I live is my Vietnam.
It’s happening right now and it’s a thing where you gotta take out an airpod and listen, and if you’re not allowed to be strapped, you put whatever you can right by your hand so if the shit pops off you can at least get a slice or two if they enter.
At that place I lived out by Pittsburgh, shit popped off every fucking day. Fights at 1 AM against my door, yelling outside of the slum. My young neighbor telling my friend the next time he rang her doorbell because mine is broken she was going to blow his fucking brains out, keep playing, she told him. He wasn’t scared; this ngga was on the street, addict, in jail, he is not scared ofanything*. Mans got stabbed in the chest, lung punctured, and chased the guy down who stabbed him and beat his head against the curb. Lucky for them both he was running out of air.
He legit saw someone’s brains get splattered on the sidewalk. He is not scared of you, sis. Keep moving.
When I moved there, I was coming from a small inner city. I knew crime I lived down the streets from the projects. But Pittsburgh is 3x as large and the boroughs and townships along the Monongahela River where there are empty mill towns and crime all up and down the shore lines have hardened me.
I’d never been in the midst of so much violence.
When I was in the food line there was a library behind us. I said, does anyone use that library? The older ladies told me, “This is [insert town] we don’t read here in [town]”.
Food line would span out around the school block.
It wasn’t necessarily a mistake to move there. I learned to code and went to meetups out there. I would not have had that opportunity here. Those opportunities gave me a launching pad to actually being a functioning member of society with a good income at one job and an phenomenal one at my last. I was able to buy things I never could have before. I could save money, improve my credit, treat my friends to dinner and gifts, and actually buy my mom expensive Christmas presents.
But there was a cost to all of it. I sold my soul for money and things and ended up losing everything.
So I am in another predicament where there are unsavory people all around me. I have some pretty big and sharp knives by my desk and my bed. Those are my only defense besides my fists. I’m older now so not sure how effective my punches would be[1] but I still have very large hands that make very large fists.
Anyway the brouhaha has subsided for a minute.
Someone told a guy to “keep runnin that train boy!” the other day and when he said that I knew that this was, indeed, a motel and I should treat living here like it.
18-23 year old me was concussing people with a single punch. I was an angry lass and a large one too, mom said I was strong as an ox. Now? Who’s to say. But don’t test it, though. ↩︎