A year after my mom got locked up, her bail finally got posted. Ten thousand dollars.
That might not sound like much to people who use credit cards like bookmarks, but out here? That's more than most folks make in months. My family isn't the kind that talks about feelings. But when it came time to save one of our own, they showed up. Everyone chipped in—cousins, aunties, people I barely knew. Even the old-timers who hated my mom still found a way to scrape together a few bucks.
She walked out of that jail a ghost. Her eyes were the same, but whatever lived behind them was gone. Bail conditions said no tech, no computers, no phones. They treated her like a walking threat to national security. And maybe she was. Not because she knew anything—but because she loved me enough to burn for it.
She never once asked me why I did it.
That silence cost her everything.
And then... life kept punching.
Seven years after she got out, my granny—the one who really raised me—passed. Quietly, in her sleep, like all the hard women do. The kind of woman who held our whole broken world together with stubbornness and nicotine. When she left, there was no one left to hold me down.
Just me. And the trust fund she left behind.
It was meant for school. "Education only," the paperwork said. But paperwork can't stop pain. I was broken, raw, and looking for something—anything—to fill the hole. And when you're seventeen, with a pocket full of inherited money and a head full of grief, you don't make smart choices.
I lived like I had infinite respawns. Spent that money like it was cursed—on highs that didn't last and friends that disappeared when it ran dry. Pills. Debt. Nights I barely remember, mornings I wanted to forget. I was chasing freedom and running from everything else.
But not all of it was darkness.
I got my GED. That's one thing I wear with pride. Walked into that exam strung out, half-awake, but I crushed it. Because no matter how deep I sank, that part of me—the sharp part, the fire-in-my-brain part—never left.
That part was still dangerous.
Still alive.