You Only Grow Up Once

I don’t remember much PDA at home, and it definitely wasn’t something people talked about, so my first exposure was probably some random late-night TV scene when I was around ten or eleven. At that age it was more “eww” than “ohhh.” I switched the channel and went right back to my games.

By middle school though, girls started to matter more.

It didn’t really hit me until my best friend had a birthday party and girls were coming over for the first time. The whole vibe was different. We weren’t just joking around like usual. It felt like everybody was waiting for someone to break the ice. However I acted that day clearly didn’t work, because I could feel myself getting pushed to the outside as the day went on.

They started teasing me towards this girl from the neighborhood. I guess you could call her my first crush, It felt like the neighborhood was pushing me toward her before I ever wanted it for myself. That pressure shut me down fast, and before long I became the kid they left out whenever girls were around.

That wasn’t easy.

At the time, my friend’s mom dropped him off at my house every morning, and after school I’d go back to his place until my family picked me up. There was this little stretch of freedom between school and getting back under parental supervision. I don’t know how it was for everybody else, but for me, once I got home I was fully submerged in whatever chaos was happening there until the next school day.

Then one day things circled back.

I remember my friends pulling porn up on the computer one day after school. Honestly, I wasn’t that interested at first, but the way everybody suddenly stopped what they were doing and crowded around the screen made me feel like I had to see what the hype was about. I can’t lie. there was one dark-skinned beauty on the screen that did something to my brain. But even that curiosity felt driven by pressure more than desire.

I found out they had secret videos hidden in specific DVD case too. They acted like they’d never watched them, but a few days later I was downstairs watching Yu Yu Hakusho when I realized everybody had slipped out of the room. I went to head upstairs and found out they had locked me in the basement. As I tried to figure out what to do with myself I noticed that same case was missing from the shelf.

I remember laughing to myself like, “How does this even work?” Because by then I was curious on my own but I was also thinking, “Are y’all really watching this together?” Not long after that, life changed fast.

I was just starting to get outside more and see what everybody had been keeping from me. One day I ended up in an alley watching my friend fight some random guy. Part of me was locked in, just watching every move. Nobody else was stepping in, and I thought my friend had it handled.

Then the other kid pulled a knife.

Suddenly I snapped back into the moment. I was ready to jump in, but my friend wrapped it up before we had to. As if that wasn't enough excitement right after that, I heard that my cousin had been stabbed All the way through his chest with a pole and had to crawl house to house to get help.

My young mind was learning, all at once, what came with growing up in an urban environment. At the same time, people acted like because I lived in a “nice house,” I was somehow protected from all that.

I wasn’t.

While all this was happening, my parents’ relationship was falling apart too. I never told my friends what was going on. What was the point? By middle school we weren’t even in the same classes anymore. Then one day at my best friend’s house, I tripped over the controller cord and broke his PlayStation. I felt terrible. I planned to tell my mom and give up some of my toys or something so it could be replaced.

But when I got home, that stopped mattering.

That night turned into another fight between my parents, and this one ended everything. My father left the house. It wasn’t the first time he had left, but it was the first time he didn’t come back.

After that, I kept to myself.

I found quiet places to disappear before class. I started catching the bus all the way home instead of going to my friend’s house. At first I thought things might go back to normal, but once I realized this was permanent, I had no clue how to talk about what I was feeling.

My friends didn’t even cross my mind.

I never really saw older men around them, so in my head I figured, “What do I look like complaining? I had my dad around longer than they did.”

Before I ever talked to anybody about it, I found out my friend had been talking trash about me, thinking I was ducking him because of the broken PlayStation. I couldn’t explain what I was actually going through, but when my friend was ready to fight me before asking a single question, I let that whole friend group go.

Real friends taking nonsense.

Fake friends in their ear instigating.

Everybody else egging it on.

And none of it had anything to do with what I was really carrying.

So I turned inward.

I became self-sufficient.

It sucks, because I remember being such a happy kid that I used to get in trouble for smiling too much. But when it came to relationships, my growth got stunted. I didn’t even realize I was missing all these rite-of-passage moments while I was stuck in my own head.

I didn’t see those old friends again until it was time to move on to high school.

I guess our parents must have stayed in contact because I still got invited to my old best friend’s graduation party. Maybe we could have reconnected, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. The day of that party was the same day my father left the state for rehab in LA. The rules were strict. He wouldn’t be able to call.

I was trying not to cry as we left the airport, and then I got dropped off at that party.

My family probably thought the distraction would help, but I was numb.

And of course, it was a whole scene.

I sat my shell shocked rump in a chair near the entrance like as if that chair would somehow keep me grounded. My crush walked by for a second. For once I wasn’t nervous. I was too detached to feel much of anything, but I didn’t have much to say either.

Eventually I wandered into the basement.

It was split into two rooms, both packed. The first room had just enough space to move through. The second was shoulder-to-shoulder.

I had never seen anything like it.

Wall-to-wall bodies. grinding, grabbing, dancing, moving like it was second nature.

I didn’t recognize anybody in there, and I had no idea how someone was supposed to step into that world. Everybody else looked natural, like they already knew the rhythm.

And it hit me in that moment:

I had missed a lot.

While everybody else had been learning how to connect, I had been surviving.

That chapter ended there.

But eventually, as high school started, I began forming closer bonds with some of my classmates.

And little by little, I would learn what I had missed