Chapter 8: The Streets Don’t Teach Love
I was loved wrong before I ever knew what love was supposed to feel like. The streets taught me survival. How to wear confidence like armor. How to smile through pain. How to make broken look beautiful. People saw the body ,The pretty face. The woman who knew how to survive. But very few ever stopped long enough to see the little girl underneath—the one still carrying wounds she never asked for. Yeah, I sold pieces of myself while trying not to lose my soul. Not because I did
Chapter 7: When the Streets Became Home
After all the bullshit, I thought I had just enough game to be on my own once again. I was tired. Tired of the bullshit, tired of these niggas, tired of people trying to control me. I was ready to do my own shit. Thank God I was back in Oakland. At least Oakland was familiar. I knew just enough to stack up. Being that I wasn’t 18 yet, I jumped into scamming and gangs. Man things was crazy. See, Oakland ain’t really have Bloods and Crips like that. We have hoods… blocks. And w
Chapter 6: Lost in plain sight
I moved through Oakland like I belonged to the streets. Meeting new people. Traveling to places I never imagined. Stacking what I could — shit really, just surviving the only way I knew how. Trying to outrun pain that somehow followed me everywhere I went. To the world, I looked grown. Like I had it figured out. Like I knew exactly what I was doing. But behind the fast life, the money, and the hard face was still a little girl trying to understand why life had forced her to
