“I am sorry I called you a fat assed ***** in seventh grade. You were smarter than me and you had your life bundled up and handed to you. I was…jealous.” Is what I imagine Keisha would say in her apology letter to on her deathbed. The white blonde hairs falling out of her head as she shriveled up like raisin.

When I knew her, her skin was always *****. She wore fluorescent clothes with spaghetti straps and she had a stick and poke tattoo of butterfly behind her ear.

Before I met her, I was scared of her because I accidentally confused her for the 6’6 ball slaying giant who could dunk it faster than you could say “we’re running sprints next practice” was also named Keisha, but then I found out Keisha didn’t play basketball (well) and was white.

Keisha rolled with her crew of other fourteen year olds. They wore matching hi-tops and hoop earrings. They were tsunamis scaring the innocence out of the other pre-teen kids. They spewed sewage on any slide-rider or sea saw-sitter that set their sights on.

She would scream obscenities at me from the sidewalk. Too proud to let her toes touch the sand that I stood on.

In my ignorance of the consequences, I said “stop” and she shouted, “say it again” and defiantly I did.

Her jaw would come unhinged like a snake as she lunged fangs first. She laid her hands on my shoulders by the swing set shoving slurs into my face in a way that said “I didn’t fall far from the tree; I was dropped by hostile hands the first time I tried to say ‘no’.”

I stepped back from her fury and I wiped the verbal ***** from my eyes. I walked away, understanding at that vulnerable age that there was nothing I could do to quell the rage of someone with venom in their veins.

The tables always turn, but I would have stopped that Lazy Susan with my grubby fingers the instant I fully swallowed the fact that her front door was a mouth of its own. From the moment she walked in, she was chewed up and chewed out. Drowning in stomach acid, to be spit up back on to the street. The child of chaos covered in caustic burns they said she “earned.” Mutilated by their incisors, canines, and molars. They drained the very life they had expelled into her bones, digesting the marrow of her wire hanging. As a result she was starving. She was bare ribbed and hollowed out. She lived with her hands stretched out before here, blind, breaking her wrists from trying to twist her way out of the straight jacket of her situation. Slashing the souls and skin of anyone she came in contact with because she was scared of the monsters that birthed her, that sang her to sleep in the next room with livid lullabies.

Hate germinates hate. It is an airborne infection eating away at the soft tissue beneath your skull, overtaking any capability to function lovingly.
So to Keisha, as you hang in holy suspension between here and somewhere else, you were corrupted by a corroding covenant and lived in absence. You lacked self-control and displaced your damagedness on anyone more available than the wolves that raised you, but you are not a laughable collection of Mr. Vultura’s failed general science quizzes, forged parental signatures, and blue bruised knuckles. You are just as human and bursting forth as me and every other person on this planet. You are vines and branches yearning for the sun, for the brightness of hope and peace. Now rest, because you are forgiven and now infinite.