“Your problem is not my problem,” words that have never sat right with me, words that have always felt like a needle piercing through my eyes over and over again, the amount of anguish those words have cost me is almost impossible to simply explain. These were the words that would mark a new beginning of my life. The beginning of hell that is so gruesome, no person could withstand it without losing their sanity. To give proper context to the situation I must give an in depth explanation of my life. My mother, who is the most important person in my life, in college would unfortunately meet my father. I don’t understand how a person like my mother could ever come to love a person like my father, but it just so happened like that. My mother would get pregnant with a child, which is myself. But it just so happens that both of my parents being from very religious backgrounds, could not have children outside of marriage, as their families would shame them endlessly for an eternity if this was to happen. This causes them to get married after only knowing themselves for a small amount of time.
Unfortunately for my mother she would be marrying Lucifer himself. My father was a strange and cruel man, the issue with a person like my father is he was not cruel for a hundred percent of the time, he would sometimes do kind acts, but what he would use to keep my mother trapped in this loop would be to use his kind acts, to justify his evil and cruel acts, which would involve constant verbal abuse, he would constantly accuse my mother of witchcraft, even as religious as my mother was she never truly believed witchcraft was real. Yet she would be blessed with constant accusations throughout her life. It was truly hard to hear all the stories my mother told of my father. I couldn’t bear to hear them but I had to. I had to learn what I could not become in the future, my mother always stressed on the importance of being a gentleman. Which is why she trained me in that direction of life. She never wanted me to even have an ounce of resemblance to my father. So one day when I was about 7 years old, she took off with me and moved to New York City, this is where life would get rough for us. Without my father paying for child support, my mother had to work a day and night job. Sometimes only getting 20 hours of sleep in a week. She worked endlessly to keep me safe. I was always grateful for everything she did for me. I made sure I always kept the house nice and clean for her. Made breakfast on her off days, which were very rare if I must add, she was extremely hard working. That’s why I loved her so much, there was nothing more important to me than my mother.
So on the day I heard the words, “Your problem is not my problem,” the hairs on my skin stood straight like trees in a rainforest, my heart beat like a drum in a marching band, my throat felt like terrace of the savannah, I was given the surprise of a thief at midnight. A truly cruel man would attack my mother and I, as we were taking a walk near an alley, he would ask my mother for all her belongings, she would try to resist him, but all to no avail, she would eventually accept her fate, and give the man all her belongings of value. The man would then hastily reveal his identity as my father.I was more astonished than I had ever been in my life. The man who put me in a horrible predicament would still have the audacity to face like this. He would decide to give us a punishment for ‘betraying his trust’. Apparently he had been searching for us for years, and now he had a chance to ‘punish’ us. And the punishment he would decide to bless me and her with, would be taking her life right in front of my eyes. I remember, as I saw his long knife glitter in the lamppost on that cold scary night, as he stabbed her. I couldn’t even cry, I was simply just confused. Why? How? What just happened? Where all thoughts that were flashing in my head within that split of a second. I would then ask him, “Why would you do this?” in a timid voice, and he would respond “Because it brings me happiness” The way he spoke showed a zeal for confidence but I could still taste the uncertainty in his voice. After all the atrocities he had just committed he still felt the right to say, “Your problem is not my problem.”