Beautiful Darkness by Maurice Mitchell (literature books to read TXT) 📖

would constantly tell me about the problems he had with his family and I realized it started taking a serious toll on him. All that time everything we went through, we went through together. I think he got a little scared when he realized I would be leaving. I never told him, but I was a little scared too, leaving my family, him and Kev behind wouldn’t be easy. I mean they were the only real friends I ever had. He never really let me see it though, he was more happy that I got accepted into college then I was. I remember when I told him, he was at work, he jumped over the counter at Sandwich Stop and grabbed me smiling from ear to ear. He kept saying “I’m so happy for you son, we made it.” See he appreciated my accomplishments as if they were his own, we experienced everything together. When I hurt he hurt, when I felt joy, he felt joy. That’s how it was for us and that’s how it was with Kev. I remember one late night I got into a beef with a few Spanish dudes who tried to jump me outside of Burger World. It was a pretty brutal battle, knives were involved and somehow a few people in the fight got stabbed. What I remember more then the fight itself though was Tay’s reaction to it. When he saw what happened, I remember him coming to tears. I had blood all over me and was limping and told him I thought the cops would be looking for me. Even more then the fact that I was hurt he was concerned with me throwing my life away. He felt like with all that I just accomplished, like getting accepted into College I just threw it all way over a fight. Though it wasn’t my fault and I had no choice in the matter he was disappointed in me like a parent would be. In that moment I discovered what friendship truly was, he was as real as it got. He cared about me more then he cared about himself, and for that I would be forever grateful. That fight not only showed me how much of a true friend I had, but coincidentally it also brought me and Kev back together. A few months before that fight Kev and I fell out over his new girlfriend. I couldn’t stand that chick, Tay couldn’t either. Simply put if you loved him, it was hard to love her. She was everything I felt a real girl shouldn’t be and a terrible influence on his life. He changed when she came around and it was obvious. I remember he stopped coming around and he stopped going to class. I remember driving by the school one day on my off hour and seeing him sitting with her ditching class, that wasn’t like him. I used to see her flirting with other dudes and everybody around the school used to comment on how she was popping with other people. I’m not much of rumor guy so I never got too much involved, but it became a little hard to ignore after the day I saw her sneak a guy in her house. At that point it was pretty much war, I knew her intentions were bad and I wanted to expose her. The only problem was I expected my brother to be on my side once the war started, I was wrong. See I’d never learned the lesson that when a man is in love nothing will come in-between that, not even a brother. Kev already had a daughter and I saw how hard he had to work just to provide her with everything he wanted her to have. I figured his girl would have saw that like I did. Again, I was wrong. So now Kev was having another child with a woman I’d proven time and time again was full of sh*t. In the end it didn’t matter, I didn’t stand a chance. It was so many lessons to be learned from this experience I couldn’t even wrap my head around it all. I couldn’t believe that he would push me to side for a chick that appeared to have nothing but bad intentions for him. Especially after all we’d been through at that point. I realized then you cant come in between a person and their mate, you’ll lose every time. Love is blind and people don’t see the truth when their in it, they see what they want to see. I decided I would never be that person, ever. No girl would every have my nose so wide open that it covered my eyes. I lived in reality, I was comfortable there. I also decided I would never let a woman come between me and my brothers. There should be a balance and never a choice, if she couldn’t understand that, it would be a problem. I also decided to never trust another man completely, so long as he is a man he still had weakness’, and woman is definitely one of them. It wasn’t all Kev’s fault though, I put him on a pedestal and got mad at him for falling. A man is going to be a man, you have to expect that. At the end of the day it was all just more lessons in life, hard lessons, but lessons nonetheless. Kev and I didn’t really speak for weeks, I figured that was the end of our relationship. It wasn’t until that fight that we started speaking again. Unfortunately, in life sometimes it takes a negative situation to bring people together again. Yet in this situation it could have been worse, it could have been a funeral. In the mist of that I was also learning lessons with my girlfriend Alyssa.

We’d been going through a rough patch every since she heard about my little escapade at the swimming pool. See I attended this pool party and we’d been basically drowning every since. It wasn’t the pool party that hindered our relationship though, it was the pretty young lady at the pool party, Alasia Jones. Alasia was gorgeous, I used to think she was the most beautiful girl in the world. She was light skinned with dimples and freckles. She had long black hair, and the prettiest smile you would ever see. See I had crush on Alasia for years, since eighth grade to be specific. She was the girl everybody in the school liked, but nobody ever seemed to get. We played a cat and mouse game for years and nothing ever came of it. Every time I actually went in she wasn’t having it, but I knew she liked me, it was weird. We would hang out all the time, but nothing would ever happen, I think that’s why I liked her. At the pool party the results were the same, nothing happen, but somehow Alyssa got a different story. There were a few of us at that pool party, everybody had on bathing suits, and we were young, so you know the drill. I had thoughts, but I didn’t follow through on any of them though, I called myself being a good boyfriend. See the chemistry between Alasia and I was always there, only difference was this time I had a girlfriend. I’d never been tempted like that before, but I succeeded, I did what I felt was right. In the end none of that mattered, once Alyssa found out we were both at the pool party and heard that we were engaged in “deep” conversations, it was over. She needed nothing more to turn us off, I was cut. I kept calling but all I ever got was her brother answering and hanging up on me. I was crushed, I felt like I did what was right, and still took the ultimate fall. I regretted my decision and wished I’d given her a reason to be mad. I learned then that the worse thing you can do to an innocent man is accuse him, and woman are going to be mad at you regardless. Feeling that way would come to haunt me later, and so would Alasia. Between having no girlfriend, the fall out with Kev and Tay changing on me I fell into a dark place again. A place filled with anger, confusion, and violence. It was around this time I started getting visions of death. I didn’t know why, but they kept coming every day. Whether they came in the form of a nightmare, or I was just sitting around day dreaming. I kept seeing myself die in a variety of different ways and I couldn’t make sense of it. Sometime I couldn’t ignore them, the dreams and the visions were so real. I was forced to pay attention and I began to prepare for my demise. The worst part about having these visions was I never shared them with anybody. I couldn’t tell my family because, well I didn’t tell my family much, and I never wanted them to worry. I couldn’t tell Kev because we were still shaky, and I couldn’t tell Tay because he worried to much. So I kept them to myself, but it was scary I genuinely felt the end could be near. It was then I started to reflect upon my life. I realized I’d made a lot poor decisions and got myself into a lot of unnecessary trouble. My parents moved me to a much better place and I should of learned to use that to my advantage. I was around the corner from going to college and it was about time I became responsible and lived up to my potential. I needed to take care of my responsibilities, I needed to be a better person. That was my plan, but unfortunately the devil had a different one. It was then I realized that for quite some time I’d been knocking on the devils door, well little did I know, he was about to answer.

Chapter 20 (School Of Hard Knocks)

It seemed like the moment I decided to stay away from trouble, trouble decided to turn it up a notch. I thought at that point in my life I’d been through something, I was about to find out I hadn’t. To me you don’t know what its like to live until you’ve starred death in the face. A near death experience can change someone’s attitude toward life in an instance, I was about to find out first hand. My first year of College was a tough one, one of the worse years of my life in fact. They say these are supposed to be the best years of your life, well they were definitely some of the worse in mine. In my first year I realized quick that college was nothing like I thought it would be. I figured it would be a far cry from high school and everybody would be on a completely different level, I was wrong. It was a lot of the same, just on a bigger stage, at least my college was. OLDU was a predominately white school with a good amount of black students. It seemed as if all of the black students knew each other and everything got around just as quick as it did in high school. Everybody was trying to capture an identity that they struggled to possess in their high school years. This was their chance to be somebody new, the person they always wanted to be. That made everybody fake, and I noticed it immediately. There was more tough guys in college then I could remember in high school, I was shocked. I thought I’d grown past all that non-sense, but I’d come to find I was far from it. Within a month of being a freshman at OLDU I