I been to hell and back. But I’m still standing fearless and solid. All I’ve been through just made me strong. I lost all my feelings. I’m solid as a rock. You can’t get to me.



Since I was just a little girl, I remember hearing gun shots every night. But not just that, I had seen drive-bys and much more. But that never scared me. See my family has been in that drug dealing type of thing for too long. Once you got that in your blood, you just born fearless. Nobody scare you.



I’ve seen more then ya’ll heard of. I remember once I was at my friends house. We were just chilling in her living room. We heard the doorbell ring so I went to open it. Somebody went running off and left a suitcase. So her daddy brought it in. We opened it, in it was her brother chopped up. They kept his head. We knew it was him because the arms had his tattoos. There was blood all over.



That’s just one of the things I’ve seen. There’s much more. Worse than that. I been a witness for many murders. I seen my own family get killed. I seen my own family kill others.



Once you around all this, nothing gets to you. And nah my family isn’t just another drug dealing, gang banging, and cold hearted family. We have our feelings too. We just don’t know how to show them. Nobody has a family history like we do.



My uncle was thirty-eight years old. He was your typical funny, alcoholic uncle. I loved him so much. He would come up with the most random jokes. He had black, short, curly hair. He had three tattoos but he never told me what they meant. One was the sun/moon. And a bottle of tequila. And the last one was a date; February 9, 1992.



Well just about a month ago, my aunt found him dead. He had been shot in the stomach in his garage. Next to him was an empty bottle of tequila. My aunt found his cell phone and it was on Google. It was a picture of the tattoo he had of the sun/moon. In front of the statue of the Virgin Mary he had, they left a note. It said “it was revenge for the war”. The war had started between the two gangs on the 9th of February.



See life is messed up and it keeps getting colder.


Have you ever loved somebody so bad, that just one day they don’t talk to you kill you inside? Well that happen to me except, it wasn’t for just one day...



I had this one cousin that I always looked up to. She had the Latina attitude. She was confident in everything she said and did, even if it was wrong. When she was seventeen, she left my house. She started stripping in a club when she turned nineteen. Then she became a prostitute.



She was messing with the wrong people. I remember calling her a week before my brothers birthday to invite her, and she didn’t answer. Two days later I called her again. She didn’t answer. The next day after school, I went to her apartment. It was unlocked but nobody was there. I stayed there waiting for her to come home. But instead a guy came.



He told me he was her “newest client”. I just left to go home. When I got home, my aunt (her momma) was there. The club manager said he found my cousin dead in the dumpster behind his club.



Turns out her newest client, wasn’t her client. He was one of the murders that had been sent to kill her and her family. But some how he disappeared. He didn’t make another move. Its still a mystery what happened to him.