“I have to tell y’all something,” my mom said. We replied with confused looks on our faces. “Clerow is gone” was what my mother said with tears in her eyes. I and my sister were both asking what happened. She replied, “Somebody stabbed him to death at the gas station.” We didn’t say anything else. The look she had on her face was the look I expected to see from the close friend that had told me about it the night before. But that was when I knew. My brother was dead. His death was that off feeling I felt the night before. Walking into the camp, I had no expression on my face, no tears, nothing. I was in shock. I sat down at a table and it hit me. I cried all day. I’d always seen or heard of a death in movies. I never experienced it in real life and it hurt more than I thought it would. Later that week, we found out who did it and why. They said it was one of his close friends that did it. That it was over a fight that happened a while ago, the friend was mad that he had lost a fight to my cousin and decided to take my brother's life because of it. I’ve never hated a person so much in my life. I wanted him dead. He’s dead over a fight? His friend did it? W as all I kept asking myself and others because it just didn’t make sense to me. I never thought someone you called a friend and someone that was considered family by your actual family would do anything like that. I started to think of my cousin’s siblings and how they felt, but mainly his little brother. They were the only two boys, he was the youngest, and they were close, so everyone knew it hit him the hardest. The family worried about him because he knew the friend, where he lived, his family, basically everything. He was capable of killing someone with the right drive. I think we all are if I’m being honest. But he stayed in the house and focused on being the big little brother, the only brother. I’ve always had trust issues, ever since I was a baby. I was picky about who I talked around and who I wanted to go with. That was already me. But it got worse after his death. I became the definition of an introvert. I didn’t talk unless spoken to, I never opened up to anyone, I kept everything to myself. I didn’t trust anyone to know anything about me, how I think, my loved ones, nothing. It was hard for me to make friends. I started wearing hoodies and dark clothes all the time when I got old enough to choose what I wanted to wear. I became depressed. His death opened my eyes to people in the “grown-up” world. Everybody in your life has intentions, good or bad. I haven’t looked at people the same ever since.
Reprinted with permission from Goucher College
Kiara is a twelfth-grade student at Centennial HS and a first-year student with Unified Efforts, Inc., Out of School Time Program. Welcome!
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I BelongMagazine.com , Autumn 2020. All rights reserved. Published by Unified Efforts, Inc., Baltimore, MD, https://unifiedefforts.org
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