​Who is the main he build it for?

Chapter 1: Letter to my 14 year old self

Sitting on the cream-colored carpet of my empty apartment, the TV on the floor. This is immediately after or during Hurricane Katrina. Listening to one of my favorite Kanye West albums. My favorite song on the album is “Drive Slow.” Don’t truly know what the lyrics are about in my young mind, but I’ve always gravitated to the song.

You’ll learn through all the experiences you are going to go through—so many experiences—and some of these experiences you won’t be fully present for, as your mind is always focused on the next thing rather than the moment.

You’ll instead drive fast, be goal-oriented, until one day in your 30s when you reflect on all your accomplishments and realize you haven’t driven slow. You’ll have driven so fast that, within a blink of an eye, you’ll be in your mid-30s and not know what direction to go. “Live today ’cause tomorrow you never know. Pump your brakes and drive slow, homie.”

When you first moved to upstate NY, you knew that was never going to be a place you would call home. You’ve always said that one day you will leave this place and not look back. You had already made a decision that you wouldn’t make any friends because most of the people did not look like you, nor did they share the same culture, coming from a strong Caribbean Haitian community.

At my big age now, I still feel anger at being uprooted from my community in Queens, but as I reflect on that decision my mom made and how it impacted my life… well, your best friend William is going to die. You’ll get a call from his niece as you’re driving your son to his grandmother’s house on your way to class at St. Rose (what was the call about how are you going to feel)

Losing him will be the first time you feel real pain. You haven’t felt this type of pain before. You and William were like brothers. And the way he died was so tragic. It will break your heart.

So many people will gravitate toward you in high school, but something will hold you back from forming relationships, which later in life you may end up regretting or not. A lot of those kids would have turned to drugs. But it still doesn’t take away that you don’t have any friends in your later years. Maybe it will be a blessing in disguise.

As your mother spends the majority of her time in NYC, you will feel a sense of freedom not having an adult watching you and being able to do whatever you wanted. As an adult, you’ll learn this isn’t normal. You’ll learn that you needed someone there to guide you. Your mother tried and thought she was making the right decision. She recently said to me, “I wish I knew more. I wish I spoke to you kids more and gave life advice and spoke about life,” something to that effect. You’ll see your mother transform into a person you don’t recognize compared to the mother you grew up with in Queens.

You will witness your mother lose the majority of her siblings, as well as her mother, and never recover from those losses. Your mom used to be the life of the party. We celebrated everything. Went to every amusement park, went to Brooklyn often, spent weekends with family.

Summers in NYC were the highlight of my life. Your mother just changed overnight from all the death, and reflecting back, you’ll realize nobody was ever there for her. It would be 10+ years before you have an actual conversation with your mother because she would always too busy and preoccupied and worried about helping someone else instead of spending her time and energy on her children and grandchildren. But you’ll recognize she is there when you need her, in her own way, and you’ll learn to accept that.

You’ll grow resentful toward your father and finally stop talking to him. You’ll grow resentful witnessing your mother sacrificing her life to care for Hardler, knowing your father lived in Brooklyn, 45 minutes from Queens, for about 10 years and never even offered to relieve your mother for a day to spend time with his own son. You’ll try to forgive him but realize he’s not a man and he’s stuck dealing with whatever demons life gave him.

You are lonely, scared, but ambitious. You will get a sense of being lost, but at some point, you will make a decision that you are more than the titles the world gave you. You are a person. You are a person with dreams, hopes, and feelings. Although it will take you a while to make that realization and even as I write this letter I’m still unclear on what those dreams are, know that it is coming.

I know you feel lost. I know you’re trying so hard. I know no one is showing you how. You are going to build a good life. And one day, you will eventually ask yourself the question you’re too busy surviving to ask now: …now that I’m here, who am I, and where do I go from a place of choice, not just survival?