22. Between Life and Death
The first thing I noticed was the absence of pain, not just physical pain but also mental anguish.
For so much of my life, pain had been a constant companion that I didn’t realize it occupied so much space until it was gone.
Prison had introduced me to physical pain, and the loss of realizing I was a motherless child introduced me to emotional pain.
Grief from losing homies on the inside had introduced me to the kind of pain that settled permanently in a man’s chest and refused to leave.
For twenty-four years, I had learned to carry all of it.
I had become so accustomed to surviving that I forgot what peace felt like.
I don’t exactly know where I am. I don’t think a Nigga’s dead yet, but I couldn’t be alive because my Millie Millz wasn’t here.
But in this space, I felt peace. There was nothing here.
No ache in my chest from being shot at my own fuckin’ wedding.
There was no pressure pressing against my lungs.
No dark memories from being on a cell block plagued me.
There was just peace.
I stood in a field that stretched farther than my eyes could follow.
Tall grass swayed beneath a warm breeze while sunlight spilled across the landscape in soft golden waves.
There were no prison walls here, no razor wire or correctional officers.
There was no campaign headquarters or reporters asking me to repeat my stance on crime and prison reform.
There were no hospital monitors or siblings crying.
For the first time since I was a young bull, the world felt quiet.
The realization should have frightened me, but instead it felt familiar; it was as if I were returning to somewhere I had once known.
I began walking through the field without any real destination in mind.
The grass brushed against my legs as I moved forward, and the longer I walked, the more I felt something inside me loosening.
The anger I had carried for years seemed farther away, and the bitterness I once held toward the justice system no longer felt as sharp.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t carrying anything.
There was no sense of responsibility or guilt.
I don’t know how long I wandered before I saw the tree.
It stood alone in the distance, massive and beautiful, its branches stretching toward the sky as though it had existed forever.
Beneath it stood a young man with his hands in his pockets.
At first, I couldn’t make out his features.
All I knew was that something about him felt familiar.
Then he turned, and my entire world stopped.
The breath left my body so quickly it hurt.
Because kin would recognize one another anywhere, even when they never had the chance to meet and decades had passed.
I knew it was my nephew before my mind caught up.
He looked just like his Dad, Xavier, and had my sister’s eyes.
My baby sister kept the loss of Xander a secret from everyone except me.
Shortly after, Baby Bear wrote me a letter bearing all.
She was so broken from losing what she believed was the last connection she had to X.
We had been writing about Xander for over a year.
Each time her pain felt more palpable on the page, and each time I consoled my little sister and told her she would see him in another life.
Seeing my tall, handsome nephew with an angelic smile made me realize I must be in that other life.
Xander walked towards me. He would be about nineteen now.
He was standing right in front of me. He wasn’t the fetus that Chanel lost or what was left of the ultrasound photographs that Chanel described to me in detail.
My nephew was a tall, strong-looking grown man.
For a long moment, neither of us moved. I simply stared at him while every emotion I had buried over the years rushed back all at once.
I remembered the day I learned he died. I remembered punching concrete until my hands bled because it hurt less than accepting the truth.
I failed my baby sister. I couldn’t hold her while she cried, and worse, I couldn’t tell X, who was spiraling and being thrown in the hole almost every damn week, about the loss either.
It wouldn’t do him any good. He wasn’t taking the loss of Chanel well.
How could he cope with knowing they made and lost a life so quickly?
I remembered praying to God for answers I never received.
I remembered wondering what kind of man my nephew would have become if he had been able to live.
Now I knew, and somehow that made it worse.
While I was happy to see Xander, my heart ached because he shouldn’t have been here.
He should have been sitting beside me at family dinners.
He should have met AJ, JoJo, and Mir. He and Jazzy should be runnin’ the streets together as college kids.
Xander should know his baby sister, Genesis. Instead, we were meeting here.
Wherever here was.
His smile widened slightly as he looked at me.
“Hey, Unc.”
The words shattered me. Because I had spent nineteen years imagining that moment, and no version of it ever came close to the real thing.
Something inside me broke open. There wasn’t any anger in his voice or even sadness.
It was as if he made peace with his destiny.
I lowered my head as tears ran down my face that I couldn’t stop.
“Man,” I whispered, shaking my head. “You don’t know how many times I dreamed of you.”
Xander smiled before looking out across the field. “I think I do. I watch over the whole family. I’ve been protecting you all and making sure Mom breathes a little easier. I’m glad to see her and Dad finally got it together.”
“I failed you,” I admitted quietly. “Had I not been tangled in the streets, I would have been a good role model for your Mom and Aunt YaYa.”
The words had lived inside me for years.
I looked down at my hands. “All this shit was my fault. Chanel was looking for love in the wrong places, her being sent away alone instead of consoled after losing X. Your Aunt Kenya being a damn drug dealer.”
For the first time since I’d seen him, Xander’s smile faded. He stepped closer and placed a hand on my shoulder.
The gesture felt so natural that it nearly brought me to my knees.
“You keep thinking like the man who got sentenced,” he said softly. “Not the man you became.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means you keep measuring your life by what was taken from you instead of what you built anyway, even despite all the world tried to take from you.”
The breeze shifted around us. I found myself staring at him again.
“You think I built something?”
He laughed. The smirk on his face resembled that of his Uncle Zayden’s.
“Are you serious?” His eyes widened.
“Unc, look at your family.”
I swallowed hard because ,immediately, images started appearing in my mind.
I thought of Camilla, Jazzy, AJ, JoJo, Mir, Channy, YaYa, Genesis, Amara, Aniyah, X, Zay, my Dad, and the baby who was on its way. I thought of every person I loved and how they loved me right back.
“You think all those people showed up for you day in and day out because they feel sorry for you?” Xander asked.
I looked away. Because part of me still did think like that. I still spent my day thinking like an ex-convict who got lucky. Even though I was home, a part of me still felt like the system had won.
“You built something bigger than yourself,” he continued. “You survived.”
Even though I had heard this speech a million times since I’ve been home, the words landed differently coming from Xander, because how dare I take survival for granted when I’m standing next to my nephew who hadn’t survived.
I had spent years treating survival as the bare minimum.
As though surviving prison wasn’t extraordinary, as though surviving grief wasn’t remarkable, and as though surviving myself wasn’t an accomplishment.
Xander smiled again.
“You became the man you were supposed to be.”
Tears burned my eyes. For a while, neither of us said anything. We simply stood there beneath that massive tree while sunlight spilled across the field around us. Then something shifted. I felt it before I understood it. I felt a gravitational pull, like a rope was wrapped around my chest.
Xander’s face became more serious. “Unc, this is where you choose if you’re really a survivor or if you’re too tired to go on.”
And suddenly I understood. I was in a state of purgatory in between life and death, a futile state, but I couldn’t stay here any longer. This wasn’t where I belonged yet.
I thought about Camilla sitting beside my hospital bed.
I could feel her holding my hand and could hear her reading to me.
I thought about our baby; we didn’t know the gender yet, but it wouldn’t matter because whoever they grew up to be, they would know they were made with so much love.
I thought about JoJo trying to act tough but missing his old man.
I thought about AJ coming home and us spending hours playing NBA 2K, like I promised him before the wedding.
I thought about Mir needing guidance and my gentle baby boy fighting when that wasn’t him.
I thought about Jazzy. Lord, my Jazzy. There was still too much unfinished business between us.
We just got one another back. I was given a second chance at life so I could love my family without limits.
“I don’t want to leave you, Xander,” I admitted.
The confession hurt more than I expected, because after spending nineteen years wishing for this moment, the idea of losing him again felt unbearable.
Xander nodded slowly.
“I know.”
The breeze moved through the field again. Neither one of us spoke for several seconds. Then he smiled. The same easy smile he’d worn when I first saw him, the one that resembled Chanel’s, and seeing it again reminded me of peace.
“Good thing this ain’t goodbye, Unc. I’ll see you again, it’s just too soon right now.”
Suddenly, I heard my Millie Millz voice. The realization slammed into me. I wasn’t dead, I was coming back. The darkness rushed toward me, and the field vanished. The hurt exploded through my body, and I felt an agonizing and violent pain.
The first breath felt like fire. The second felt even fuckin’ worse. The machines surrounding me beeped frantically, and I heard nurses shouting. My eyelids felt impossibly heavy as I fought to open them.
I slowly and painfully pried my eyes open, lights flooded my vision, and blurred shapes appeared, then sharpened.
The first thing I saw was Camilla. Her head rested beside my hand. Her fingers wrapped around mine. She looked exhausted but still beautiful. The sight nearly brought me to tears.
“Milla–”
The word barely escaped my throat. Her head shot up so fast her chair nearly toppled over. For a second, she just stared, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Then she started crying hard. It was the type of cry that came after carrying grief for too long. I squeezed her hand weakly.
Then another memory slammed into me. The wedding and the balcony.
I hadn’t realized in the heat of being shot that right before I said my vows, I saw the shooter.
I remembered turning to make eye contact with the guests, and I remembered seeing movement out of the corner of my eyes.
I remembered seeing a face. It wasn’t a fuckin’ stranger who shot me, it was someone I knew and recognized immediately.
My pulse accelerated. The monitors responded instantly.
Camilla grabbed my face. “Jared? Baby? What’s wrong?”
But I wasn’t looking at her anymore. I was staring past her. Staring into the memory. Because after a month trapped between life and death, I finally remembered exactly who had pulled the trigger, and when I spoke their name, I knew everything was about to change.