The Middle Child: Next Level

2: Sasha

The layout of the building was quite simple and easy to navigate. It was a co-ed dorm, but it was split in half, boys on one side, girls on the other, and each side had a keycard entry, the key card being my student ID, which granted me access to the building, and the girl's side, but not the boys, which made sense and which I also greatly appreciated. The first floor was one big common area, were everyone could intermingle and hang out. Once I got to the stairwell of the girl's side, I quickly made my way upstairs, not needing to use my keycard because the doors were propped open for move in day, and once I reached the second floor I entered the hallway, and the first thing I noticed was the theme that the hall had, which was Black women in music. Along the walls were poster sized album covers and portraits of singers and girl groups from the Motown years all the way until recent years, so of course there were images of the Supremes, Patti Labelle, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, En Vogue, SWV, and, you guessed it, Beyoncé and Destiny's Child, among countless others. I had to give it to the RA of this floor, she did her thing with the decorations and themes. On each door was a smaller 6×6 inch sized photo of the album art of a hit album, and on both sides was a CD cut-out that had the names of whoever was assigned to that room. It was really dope.

I walked down the hall, admiring the décor as well as paying close attention to the door numbers so I wouldn't pass my room. I didn't have to walk far, because one side of the hall were odd number doors and the other side were even, so by the fifth door I had finally reached my door. The second I saw the album art for my door I immediately stopped in my tracks, my eyes wide and my jaw dropped.

Now, either someone was playing a big joke on me, or the Lord was testing me, because as my luck would have it, the album the RA chose for my door was my mom's B-Day album, the album my mom was coincidentally working on while she was pregnant with me. I was so in shock; I couldn't really do anything but laugh. I took my phone out my pocket, snapping a picture of my door before going to the group chat with Mommy and Mama and sending it to them, knowing they would laugh when they saw it.

It's been about two weeks since Simone was born, and since then things have been really different. Even though Mama was being vague about Uncle Cole's whereabouts, June and I were quickly able to put two and two together and we knew that he had not only missed her birth, but he was also completely untraceable throughout the entire ordeal so he couldn't have known, and that really upset us, because we thought he was better than that. We hadn't known him long, but anyone could see that he was a workaholic, I mean he had my entire family combined beat in that area.

Of course in my mind, that's a character flaw that can negatively impact a relationship if left unchanged, and that really made me feel a way because ultimately, that's my Mommy getting hurt and I don't like that! She doesn't deserve that, and neither does Nugget. Just seeing her try to hide how she was really feeling once we came back from D.C. that day really made me sad, because here she was, just gave birth, the happiest moment in her life that she not only dreamed about, but wished and prayed for and now it had finally come into fruition, but she couldn't respond and react in the way she really wanted because in the back of her mind she's sad and worried, creating scenarios in her head because this guy was nowhere to be found.

That's really messed up.

He may not have realized it then, but he put a sour taste in all of our mouths after that, and if I'm being quite honest, I don't think there's any coming back from it. Apologies can't fix that, changed behavior can't fix that. He's a surgeon so he should know, that what he did was like a life changing surgery that went wrong for a moment, and even though the mistake was fixed, it still left a lasting impact on the patient that they would now have to live with forever. For someone to be so smart, what he did was so stupid and even if we could all move past what he did, it was still like a permanent scar that would forever change how I saw him.