TRIGGERED

I thought the world would change. It didn’t. So I had to.

Phones don’t ring at 5:00 a.m. Not when you’re a teenager. Not when the night before was so typical. School, my friend J.P’s house for dinner, then basketball practice with my club team till 10:00 p.m. Those were my days.

So when my phone rang at five in the morning, I instinctively reached for my chest. It’s like my heart knew even before I did. Something’s wrong. And when the voice on the other end of the line confirmed that one of our best friends had been murdered in his own staircase, nothing I did could stop my heart from bleeding tears onto my bedsheets.

I was 15 at the time. Just two nights before I spoke to this friend over the phone. He was older and made sure to call me nearly every day just to check up and make sure I was good. Now he was gone and I was left scarred.

I thought the world would change that day.

I thought everyone would be different. I thought rain would pour from the sky and anyone who ever knew my friend would change their lives so they didn’t end up like he did.

I was wrong. So wrong. Nothing changed. And after an outpouring of emotions at the funeral, no one changed, either.

Then it happened again. Another early morning phone call. Another close friend murdered in the parking lot of his townhouse complex. This one cut deep. It broke his brother. He was never the same. Again, I waited for the world to acknowledge it had lost one of its evangelists. Someone who loved life for no other reason than to be alive. Gone. Just like that.

But nothing…

Paranoia

These murders still haunt me. These and the dozen more like these I’ve endured over my adolescent years. After a while, I wondered who’d be next. And since I was around that type of environment, I realized it could be me.

So I stopped feeling. Those emotions do you no good when you feel like you’re in the jungle. I moved around with people I thought would keep me safe. No going out on my own. Who knows what could happen when you’re alone. I stood behind bus shelters, hidden from the street. I’d seen too much.

Everyone I met was a suspect. I was wary of new friends, scared to connect with anyone outside of my direct group. I felt like a target for any person with baggy jeans who walked by me. My heart would pound as we side-eyed each other before keeping it moving.

This level of paranoia was normal. Routine, even. It was my defence mechanism. My way of getting by day-to-day. The thing is, you just can’t turn it off. Once you inject that mindset into your veins, it circulates through every part of your being.

Now all of a sudden I’m late for classes. Now I’m failing classes. My standard for what it means to be a good person descends to, “at least I’m not on the streets.” Authority means nothing to me because they don’t get it. They don’t get who I have to be. They don’t understand that I’ve made myself this way so I could survive. And I don’t just mean that literally. I mean there’s no way my mind could accept everything I’d seen unless I became this person. It was necessary.

It took an angel

It took years of parenting to begin my shift from this type of attitude. Having a child at 19 forced me to trust again. It forced me to lower the curtain I’d raised to let people see who I was. Being a good person meant a lot more to me. I had an example to set. My daughter wasn’t going to be like me. The relentlessness of the world wouldn’t break her.

Today, I still shudder when my phone rings past midnight. I get goosebumps every time I turn on the news to learn someone else has lost their life because of violence. I’m better at letting people in, but it takes a lot. You can know me for months without getting past the surface, years before you know who I really am. I make friends easily but let them go just as fast.

I know it sounds extreme, but I don’t want to end up in a staircase or parking lot. That’s the precise thought that goes through my mind when I first meet someone. And it lingers in my mind till it doesn’t. A circumstance forged by my past.

It’s been well over 15 years since that first phone call. Time hasn’t yet healed these wombs. If I’m still dealing with the residual, I can only imagine what these families are going through. I’m still triggered by these murders to this day. Maybe I shouldn’t expect that it goes away.

C R Y

TRIGGERED was originally published in C.R.Y on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.