Zoya
Recommendation: Listen to “I Stay In Love” by Mariah Carey
That man.
He made it hard to second guess my decision or even be mean to him. Even though I was pregnant with his baby, and couldn’t go a day without thinking about him, it was in my nature to be mean to a man.
Even if it was my man.
Gerald showed me that for me, he would make what I thought was impossible, fucking possible.
I’ve never experienced that with any man I dated, only with my brothers.
Men had always been such a letdown when it came to proving themselves.
Most men liked to let their dicks hang and puff their chests out like they were the one, and in reality, they couldn’t do shit for me.
If I asked my brothers for a candy cane, Menace or Don would have taken me to the north pole to track one down.
It was because I knew I could ask my brothers for anything and they would make it happen, that I naturally went the other way when it came to the type of men that I dated. Impossible wasn’t in the Caselli vocabulary. Navy and Stevie learned that first hand when they got with my brothers.
Gerald wasn’t like the others.
I had a taste for edamame in chili oil, called him to just be a brat, and he solved my problem from hours away.
Not to mention, he sounded preoccupied with all the whispering he was doing.
I missed him, so calling him was less about being a brat and more about hearing his voice.
The last thing I expected was for him to do anything about it.
I mean, what the hell could he do? I was outrageous with some things, but even I knew he couldn’t get me what I wanted.
Eventually I turned over to get some sleep. That was short lived when I jumped out my sleep to someone beating on my door. When I snatched the door open and Kobe was standing there holding a bowl filled with edamame tossed in chili oil, I could damn near cry.
This wasn’t a pregnancy craving. I’ve always had these moments when I had an intense craving for something. I’d hyper fixate on it for weeks, and then one random day I never picked it up again.
Kobe told me that Goo had one of the staff members leave the island to grab the ingredients from the main island, then sent him a website with the recipe that he found online. Even with all he had going on back home, he made this a priority.
It was a reminder that I wasn’t too much for the right man.
In the past, it was easier to date down because I didn’t love myself. How the hell could I expect any good man to love me when I couldn’t even do it? It was easier to put up with men like Sigel because deep down we both knew he wasn’t shit.
There were many times when I should have walked away. There were moments when I knew I was better than what I was allowing and shouldn’t have been trying to make it work.
Then I heard that bitch in my head.
That voice could convince a snail to open a salt bar. She made me believe that I didn’t deserve the kind of love that bitches like Jahquel J. wrote about in her books.
She forced me to believe that I had to settle for men like Sigel because that was the best that I could get. I believed that nobody would put up with my bad attitude and dramatics. When in reality, there were men out there ready to put it all on the line to love a woman like me.
Gerald Wraithe.
He met me where I was and wanted to heal me all the way to the finish line. Gerald was the kind of man who would say one thing and stand on what he said. As ruthless as Goo was out in those streets, he never brought that side to me.
He had always been soft with me, even when I wasn’t at my softest. He encouraged me to be something I never thought I could be.
Soft.
He was affectionate. Always showing me that he desired me, and my doubt was all in my head.
The man was transparent with his feelings, never leaving room for me to second guess his intentions.
Every time I felt like he had dismantled a piece of that brick wall, I snatched it back to keep my wall up.
A man like him scared me.
As I sat on this balcony sucking the hell out of this edamame, tears fell down my face and this time I didn’t rush to wipe them away so I could pretend that I was alright. I was allowing myself to feel all the emotions that I kept bottled up.
The fear I had from someone seeing me being down or showing emotion wasn’t normal. I felt weak if I cried or expressed how I felt about something. Affection and emotion weren’t something that us Caselli siblings had done well.
It was easier to pretend that it didn’t exist than to get down to the root of the issue. The last time I remembered my brother and sister showing emotion was when I was a teen. It happened, and then we moved on with life like that small moment in time never occurred.
None of us ever spoke about it.
It was brushed under the rug because there was always something else going on, and speaking about the past was something we avoided. Rather than rehash the past and deal with some skeletons, it was easier to pretend it never happened.
Out of sight and out of mind.
It was painful to accept the truth that the mother I had always known was actually my sister. The siblings that I had grown up with were my niece and nephews. Every time the thought crossed my mind, it made me sick.
Everyone kept saying nothing changes, but it did for me. The one thing I held onto was my parents’ love. There was so much love in our home, and I held onto that. When things were tough, I often thought about the fact that I was wanted and made in love.
When in reality, my siblings were the ones that had been made in love.
I was made in fear, terror, and an abuse of power.
My entry into life wasn’t something to praise.
It was something that required deep therapy and the strength not to kill yourself.
When I stared into that woman’s eyes as she held onto that baby doll, I became sick thinking about how someone took advantage of her.
Nobody protected her.
She was raped. Forced to carry a pregnancy and then had to feel the pain of giving birth to the evidence.
She was put through all of that without understanding anything that was happening to her.
The doll that she held onto with the death grip was all she understood.
Her real baby had been snatched from her and replaced with a replica that she held onto all these years.
Fuck.
So, when someone thought I could move forward, the reality was that I couldn’t move on because she was all I thought about. I thought about her being in a place like that one without any family. Not knowing her daughter was murdered, and the other one was raised as her child.
I choked on the spice from the beans and took a deep sigh. All I could do was push it out of my mind for now. Just the thought of my history that was kept away from me was enough to keep me in my head for long periods of time.
After my dramatic ass crying session, I finally mustered up the energy to make my way downstairs.
Me and Ms. Sharon shared our villa. It was nice with it being the two of us, because we both valued our alone time.
She called up when she cooked dinner, and we often ate together, but other than that, she allowed me to sit in my solitude without becoming offended.
There was a bedroom with a bathroom on the main level, so it was easy for her to get around.
In the evenings, Gams walked over here and they sat out back together.
I took a sip of the sorrel that was resting in the fridge, then checked the living room. She was usually in there watching her stories, or on the back patio. I checked both before heading down the hallway towards her bedroom.
“Ms. Sharon?” I called out.
“Bathroom.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll give you privacy,” I replied, backing away from the door.
She was trying to use the bathroom and here I was calling her name while interrupting her.
“Zoya, come in here… please.” It was the tone of her voice that made me enter the bathroom quickly.
I was worried that she fell again. Anytime Goo questioned her on it, she shooed him away and reminded him that she was grown.
I pushed open the bathroom door, expecting her to be sprawled on the floor like a life alert commercial. Thankfully, she was sitting on the edge of the tub, her back towards me.
“Everything okay?”
She sighed. “When I had both my legs… yes.”
I felt so bad when I saw the expression on her face.
It was the look of defeat and embarrassment, and it couldn’t be overlooked.
I could tell she didn’t want to ask for help.
Everything inside her didn’t want to ask someone else for help.
She probably sat on the edge of that tub debating on how she could do it herself.
Sharon wasn’t used to asking for help, but she needed it.
We often took the simple things like jumping in a quick shower, using the bathroom or even planting both feet onto the floor before getting out of bed for granted.
Even the privilege of having privacy because we could care for ourselves. It was a privilege, because not everyone could do those things on their own.
With the way Goo spoke about his mother, she was his superwoman.
There wasn’t anything that she couldn’t or wouldn’t do for her boys.
He spoke on her working several jobs and always making it to some of their school events, if she could get the time off.
Her sons were her priority, which made sense why both Khaos and Gerald didn’t play about their mother.
“Okay, tell me what you need from me, Ms. Sharon?” I asked, careful not to be too pushy, or make her feel like she was helpless.
“There’s no shower chair, so I have to wash up on the side of the tub. It’s a struggle trying to get my lack of leg back over.”
I looked at her. “Your nub.”
Silence filled the space before she broke out into laughter. “Yuh too facety, gyal,” she spoke in patois. “I like it.”