Life and This Place Called The Bronx.

Even if you’ve never been to this place everybody loves it here, but they love it only because they don’t know the real here. What they see on television and what they believe is just a mere perception of what really is to be in this city.

For a lot of us, it hasn’t been so easy, this place has shaped many of us tremendously.

How many times have you roamed these New York streets trying to figure out who you are?

For me? It's been no less than plenty.

There have been so many times in my life where I felt out of place. I guess it was how I looked or how I dressed or maybe it was the way I wore my hair.. maybe it wasn’t but whatever it was, the way I felt about me determined how everyone else felt about me also, like that time my mother told me a childhood “friend” said I smelled like fish or maybe that time the little African boy in my sixth-grade class spit in my face, but I always knew I had an issue or better yet I started to realize everyone else had an issue with me. I’ve always been shy and I always felt misunderstood. I was afraid to talk to people, afraid to look at people, afraid to be around people and I guess people sensed that and used it to their advantage. I felt no one truly understood. I felt I had no one to relate to. I was just me while everyone was trying so hard to be everything else, at one point I just felt like a lost soul. It's such a sad thing to be a lost soul in this big city because time ...especially time in New York waits for no one.

Not even me.

Chapter One

This Life

“Daddy left when she was five leaving mommy bitter, so there she was just alive, now mommy’s forced to strategize because eventually, this life would get bigger.”

Growing up my grandmother made It her duty to have us around one another. My cousins and I were always together. I really didn’t know if it was because our parents were busy or if that’s just how she wanted it to be. Maybe it was a little bit of both but the weekends were the moments for big breakfasts at the table, sleepovers, hide and seek, and all of the movies we could possibly watch on TV. Maybe that’s where my love of movies came from. Everyone was welcomed even if you weren’t family you could have been a friend, a niece, or maybe even that kid next door whose parents didn’t really pay them much attention but to grandma whoever you were and wherever you came from you were always taken care of. I was the youngest of them all and also the weirdest, the loneliest, and the shyest. I was indeed the black sheep.

I was born Karma Leanne Burns but everyone knew me as (insert name here) don’t ask me why. I hated a lot of things and I disliked everything about school. At one point it was hard for me to even fit in and once I began to not give a shit I felt as though I became unruly. Throughout middle school I made friends and lost a few, I fought, I skipped classes, I failed classes, and I almost didn’t graduate but I didn’t care because none of that even mattered at that point I just began “living” or what I thought was living. I was in my own little world, marching to the beat of my own bass drum. I often found myself daydreaming in classes writing stories with different characters line by line, in a perfect world where everyone had what they thought they deserved, and everyone was with who they thought they loved at the moment. I wrote stories so much that my science teacher Ms. Sharp actually took my story once while I was paying absolutely no attention to the lesson then said and I quote “so this is what you’re doing in my class?” followed by “I wonder what your mother would say about this.” And I honestly didn’t give a rat's ass. I just wanted my story back. But of course, I never got it, in fact, I never got a lot of things. My parents had to come in one day to get my story (I know petty right?) and my mom couldn’t make It because of her work schedule so my stepdad had to fill in, even though I knew he was there for my story and me, I felt his eyes creating his own story with Ms. Sharp. Now she was cute and all but suddenly the real reason why he even took the trip to my school in the first place went out the window and at that point, I realized he wasn’t shit. I remember 8Th-grade graduation like it was yesterday, leaving with my mother and stepdad to celebrate and them being so proud but were they really proud or just relieved? If there’s one thing my mom did not like, it was embarrassment. no matter what happened all that mattered was that you didn’t embarrass her. she just did not like to be shamed. I guess it’s an island thing or maybe it’s not.

Nope, it’s definitely an island thing. So I guess I made it my duty to not “embarrass” her but let me just say I failed miserably.

Where was my real father you ask? Well he was gone but he thought he wasn’t, he came in and out of my life whenever he pleased, had a bunch of kids whenever he pleased and then tried to bring us all together and make us feel as if we all knew each other, typical Jamaican man right?

He was never really a consistent part of my life, and let me just say, like most bitter baby mothers my mom on the other hand never kept me away from him, he was there one minute and then gone the next even though we both lived in the Bronx I felt like he was miles away, I didn’t really know how to feel maybe because I was young but I knew that I wasn’t getting what I needed, I knew I did not know what it felt like to be a “daddy’s girl”, long story short. My father ain’t shit either.

And as I go on you’ll realize there’s a lot of people in my life who aren’t shit, but we’ll get into that later but for now,

Let's continue....