ko-fine siri-bae imagines.

ghana antics ; part one .

"look at you. you've stitched your life so perfectly together. you've worked so damn hard to get to where you are, and now have everything you ever wanted. so why do you keep looking back at the one thing that can undo it all?"

-Lang Leav.

CHAPTER ONE.

The first I'd ever enjoyed sex was when I did it with my ex-boyfriends brother, now at the time we were dating, it sucks, but that's what happened. I figure if I'm going to tell a story, I have to tell it right, I have to be completely honest with myself and the readers.

I used to be wild. I guess I still am considering the fact that I haven't changed one bit since that incident. I got my heartbroken a wild amount of times after that, I had jumped from guy to guy after that. I tried anything that would take my mind off of the fact that I had fucked up once again, and I broke a completely great guys heart. I think that's when I got introduced to weed and any other wild drug out there. I also took that as an initiative to start drinking.

I was eighteen when this happened, I'm twenty-one now, I try not to think about it anymore, as the past is behind me and the present and future are the only thing that matters.

I lived in a small apartment I'm downtown New Orleans with my mom, and my younger brother Daniel who's sixteen with the mouth and mind of a forty-two year old man who's been through so much.

My mom used to be pretty, she used to be wise, and witty and smart. Used to be. Last year, around May she met a man by the name of Marcus. He was great, he owned a really big upscale clothing line, he owned a really dark past too. One day, they had a big argument and Marcus said he was leaving mama for good. And she cried, and cried that night. She cried until her eyes were swollen and red and her nose ran.

A few weeks later, she stopped coming home and when she did she had passed out, and she was really angry, or happy yet jittery. I knew what was wrong just by looking at her, she reminded me of the crackhead women on the train who constantly begged me for the time and a dollar. She was on drugs. This had gone on for two months, right up until she had beat on Daniel for the television that was missing, when in reality she had forgotten she and her crackhead friends sold it for a fix. I wasn't making great money, so the first person I contacted was grandma Macie. She lived in Accra, Ghana but that was the only person we knew, the only person we could say with.

I called her, and I filled her in on everything, and the next week we had two tickets to Ghana. We hadn't been there for years, we had just stopped once my grandfather died.

"It's hot as hell down here!" Daniel exaggerated the second we got off the plane, causing me to roll my eyes at his early complaints, as I used my professional Sony Alpha A7 the New Orleans museum of Art rewarded me with for my birthday when I worked there. I quit a couple weeks ago after mom started to act crazy. "How long we gon' be down hea'? It's too damn hot!"

I ignored his comments and walked along, snapping a shot of the airport. This was my first trip back, and whenever Daniel and I made our way back to New Orleans I could look at these pictures and remember my time here.

Grandma's fried Delores picked us up since grandma was dealing with some serious community problems at a community meaning, typical grandma. Grandma had been the community leader for as along as I had known and she was great at it. I made Daniel sit in the front, and of course she had to talk his ear off.