I Don't Want to Lose You

Back Down Memory Lane Series

I DON’T WANT TO LOSE YOU

By Loreen James-Fisher

This book is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Loreen James-Fisher

All rights reserved, including the right or reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Dedicated to my Mom and Dad

PROLOGUE

June 2010

Present

              It's funny how the brain works.  Especially my brain.  It takes a moment and can store so much about it that there can be a handful of things that can trigger a memory.  It can be a familiar smell or the way a breeze seems to be wrapping itself around you to a simple word.  If it's a good memory, you savor it while wishing you could have that moment back.  If it's a memory that sucked majorly, you try to quickly move on to another thought and tuck it under the bed with the rest of the dirty clothes you haven't felt like dealing with.

             
That's how I think it's supposed to work with normal people.  But then again, I never viewed myself as normal.  I have the fortune of having a memory and, while trying to savor the tastes, smells and tones, my brain gets triggered to another memory.  And it keeps going and going until there's nothing but a flood of words, thoughts and places pushing and shoving each other trying to be the main event in my mind until it gets moved out of the way for another one to take its place.

             
I was nervous about coming here today because I knew what my brain was going to do and I was hoping that emotionally I would be able to handle it.  I mean really, it's just a graduation at a high school.  My old high school.  A place where moments happened that led to events that led to me being who and what I am now. 

             
As I try to carefully climb the bleachers to reach everyone supporting Manny, I remember this side of the football field is where we took our senior class panoramic picture.  There were almost five hundred of us.  Suddenly my mind sends me back there in my green cap and gown and I hear him say, “Come stand by me.” 

             
Stop brain! Stop!
 
I am here for Manny.
  That was eleven years ago but boy does it seem like it was yesterday.  I get to the row where everyone is sitting and see smiling faces and people saying hi and asking me how I am.  I think I smiled and gave courteous remarks but it's all a blur from trying to get my brain under control.  I sit down next to Ralph, who is in his normal dressed up outfit of jeans and a heavy metal t-shirt with his hair pulled back into a ponytail.  He hasn't changed a bit since we graduated, with the exception of a few gray hairs.  He's even still sporting the same tired mustache he had back then.  I would have thought he would have added a goatee by now.

             
After looking me up and down he asks, “Are you all right?”

             
I bit my lower lip while trying to figure out who was going to be the one in control here, my brain or my will power.  I reply, “I don't know, Ralph.  Ask me when this is all over.”

             
“Is Brandon coming?” he asks.

             
I shake my head no.  If he didn't have to come then he wasn't going to come.  I can understand why and at the moment wish I was with him.

             
I take a seat next to Ralph and he puts his arm around me and gives me a little shake.  “I'm right here, okay?”

             
I nod and say nothing as I know in my heart I'm in trouble.  I try so hard to limit myself from being around everyone I just purposefully surrounded myself with because of my brain and the ultimate evil betrayal that is always bound to come. 

             
I look around at the blue sky while soaking in the California sun.  It's a nice day for an outdoor event such as this.  I look around at how green the grass is on the field and all of the chairs on top of it.  It looks like this graduating class is a little larger than mine was.  I look at the ghetto family three rows down from us who has a teenage daughter wearing an outfit three sizes too small for her flabby behind.  Her family must not love her or she can't have any real friends because there is no way that someone who cared about her would let her walk out of the house in that outfit under the impression that she looked remotely close to cute, let alone decent. 

             
I'm trying to find anything to occupy my mind so that I don't have to listen to anything that anyone is saying around me.  I'm trying to keep all triggers to a minimum.  I am here to support Manny.   Twelve years ago I would have never thought that I would be sitting here for him.  I remember the first time I was even aware of his existence.

             
“You have knees like my brother.  I think his knees are ugly,” he said.

             
Stop it brain!

             
I remember meeting Manny for the first time and I think he was about six years old.  I asked him to show me his knees.  He looked at me like I was crazy but he rose up his pant leg and showed me.  I said to him in the sweetest voice possible while staring his brother dead in his eyes, “Oh, don't you have nice knees?”

             
You hate me, don't you?  How can my own brain hate me?  I don't understand it.  Didn't I ask nicely?  Well, maybe I didn't.  I think I did more of that mother tone when I said stop it but I meant it in the nicest way possible.  Now can you please stop?

             
I remember covering my face with my hands being so embarrassed that my emotions were getting the best of me from watching a chick flick.  My brain was doing what it is doing to me now, running all over the place.  Little, chubby hands removed my hands from my face and Manny asked, “Why are you crying?”

             
“Because she's a girl,” his brother said while handing me some tissue.

             
Suddenly, all of these snippets of Manny over the years start going through my head, with and without the link we had.  Inside I'm sobbing, telling my brain to please stop and not to do this to me sounding like a victim beseeching her rapist to not do what he's going to do.  No amount of tears, begging or resisting is going to make sympathy suddenly occur and everything go back to normal.  Normal being me just sitting in the bleachers with friends and family enjoying a graduation of a remarkable young man.  Instead, the violation begins and I have to hope I can handle it.

PART ONE

In the Beginning…

CHAPTER ONE

             
Southwood is a small city in California.  Every morning you wake up with hope of making it through the day without incident and every night you fall asleep to the comforting sounds of a police helicopter flying above your house looking for someone that did something.  It's not really a city that has anything to put it on the map.  It's more of a drive through city.  You drive through it to get to where you really want to go.  The areas around it though aren't always where people want to go.  Southwood connects the southeastern part of Los Angeles to other cities that have something worth driving through it to get to.

             
Even though it was a small city, there were still enough people there to have ten elementary schools.  It was 1992 and I, Monica Walker, was in sixth grade and attending Thomas Jefferson Elementary.  My parents decided not to participate in the exodus of Black people to other cities and instead had moved from one side of town to another.  Even though George Washington Elementary was literally right around the corner from the new house, I decided that I would walk forty minutes one way each day to stay at Jefferson and graduate with my friends. 

             
Southwood has good parts of town where the upper lower class lived and then there was the rest of it for everyone else.  My parents worked extremely hard to get out of South Central L.A. and we lived as upper lower class with my dad as a fire captain in another city and my mother was an event planner.  They were both the first of all of their siblings to get out and live the dream of home ownership.  As a Black family that “made it” in the eyes of others, that meant that there were standards my sister and I had to live up to and exceed once we became adults, especially me since I was the oldest.