Page 2

After my grandma suddenly passed away, that was really the only family that I had left.

If it wasn’t for my pops best friend, Dutch stepping up, I know for a fact that I would have been thrown into the system, being raised in foster care, and group homes.

Dutch took me in, and that man loved me as if I came from him.

Growing up, you couldn’t tell me that Dutch wasn’t my pops, and you couldn’t tell that nigga that I wasn’t his son.

He was the one that had given me the nickname ‘Law’ when I was just eight years old.

I was given that nickname because I was always the kind of kid to want to know ‘why’.

I was an inquisitive ass lil nigga. All that shit that happened with my pops, my mom, and my grandma, you couldn’t just tell me the short version of the story.

I wanted all the details. I didn’t want my mind to have any room to wonder.

Dutch will tell me till this day that when I moved in with him at just eight years old, he would often feel as if he was in the presence of a grown man whenever he was around me because that’s just how wise I was.

On top of that, I had a vocabulary of someone that was at least twice my age.

Law is what stuck, and that’s what people have been calling me for years.

Dutch was in the same career field that my pops was in.

In fact, Dutch was my pops right hand man, so once he was killed, Dutch took over, and he ran the business.

Dutch had money out the ass, so growing up, I was living ghetto fabulous.

I didn’t want for shit. I used to have all the flyest gear, I had a mean shoe collection, and at just eight years old, my jewelry collection was better than a grown ass man.

When it came to education, Dutch made sure to keep me in private school, with a tuition that wasn’t even the average person’s salary.

Shit, by the time I was nine, I knew what it was that Dutch was out here doing, so from that tender age, I knew that I wanted to be lawyer, just in case Dutch, or the niggas that he ran with ever got caught up, I wanted to be the one to save them. That was my mindset at nine years old.

Eight years old was the age I was when Yaya moved next door.

At the time, it was just her, her mother, and her twin sister, Shai.

Everybody will tell you that I fell in love with Yaya when I saw her for the first time.

Mind you, I was eight. I didn’t have any hair on my chest, I didn’t know what the fuck love was, but I knew that I wanted Yaya.

For my age, I was grown because I used to hang around grown niggas all the time, and I would pick up on their lingo, and I would see the way they were with women, and I thought that I could be a sponge, and go back, and do, and say all the things to Yaya that I would see Dutch, and those niggas do to other women.

Yaya wasn’t having that shit though. At six years old, she hated me.

She was in that phase where she thought all boys were dirty, and had the ‘cooties’, so she wasn’t trying to fuck with me.

She didn’t find her common sense until the time she was about twelve.

That’s been my lil shit since she was twelve, and I was fourteen.

Just about everything that we could have gone through together, we’ve gone through it, which is why I didn’t believe that right now, we were on opposite sides of the courtroom, and her ass had really gone through with this bullshit ass divorce.

My wife was the kind of person that just likes to do shit, mainly to get a reaction out of me, and I swear to God this was the highest length that she’s gone to piss me off, and to get a reaction out of me, but here we were.

“We don’t have any closing remarks your honor,” Trent responded to the judge, once I looked at him, and basically told him with my eyes that I was fine with everything that we’d shared in court, and I didn’t feel the need to prolong this shit.

Yaya, and I had twin boys. Our boys were fifteen years old, and their names were Legend, and Creed.

She knew not to try any funny shit with me, by asking for full custody of those boys because it would have taken everyone in this courtroom to get me off her ass.

She knew what my sons meant to me, so even with her doing this petty ass shit by having us come to court, she knew that I drew the line on her coming for my kids.

In return, I knew not to do that shit to her as well.

Our boys meant the world to Yaya. She would put hands and feet on me if I tried to take them for full custody, so I didn’t go that route, either. We both just wanted 50/50 custody.

Our divorce has been an ongoing process for almost a year because there were so many steps that had led to this moment.

For the longest, I wasn’t taking her ass serious when she brought the divorce up.

This was the same woman that would still have my semen dripping down her thighs, then would get in her feelings, hollering about a divorce.

At the time, I felt like Yaya didn’t know what the fuck she wanted, so I wasn’t entertaining her shit.

I didn’t start thinking that this shit was serious until she moved out of the house.

Well, in her case, she packed up some of her shit, and she went to her mama’s house.

Weeks later, that’s when paperwork came in the mail, where her goofy ass had me served with divorce papers.

That’s when I knew she was serious. By that time in our marriage, I had a mindset of, it is what it is , and if that’s what she wanted, I was willing to give it to her.

We were in a bad place in our marriage for the last two years of it, really.

We took a loss that was hard for either one of us to shake back from.

We lost our daughter. Our beautiful baby girl, Sarai, was robbed of life, only getting four months here on earth.

A death that was so sudden, and unexpected.

A nighttime routine, just like any other night, where she was bathed, fed, and placed in her basinet that was on the side of our bed.

Just like our boys, Sarai had her own bedroom, but we hadn’t had a newborn baby to love on at that time in over ten years, so instead of having Sarai sleep in her nursey most nights, where her crib was, Soraya and I would often let her sleep in our room, where her bassinet was.

By this point, I knew that Sarai would wake up like clockwork around two in the morning, wanting to be fed.

Knowing that that was something that she would do, I would naturally wake up at that time, so that night, when I woke up at two in the morning, I was shocked to see that my daughter didn’t wake up.

At the same time, I had to piss, so I remember walking to the bathroom, handling my business, and I came back in the bedroom.

Sarai still hadn’t woken up for her feeding, which was weird to me.

That’s when I looked down into that basinet after making it back in the room, and I saw what was left of my daughter in there.

It had been enough to bring a grown man to tears.

I just remember letting out a scream that I had never let out before in my life, and that scream caused my wife to quickly wake up, and our boys to rush in the room to see what was going on.

I’ll never forget that night. I’ll never forget the way my wife crashed out.

To know my wife, is to know that she was the crash out queen, and she would take it from 0 to 100 in a few seconds, but even with all the times that I’ve witnessed her over the years getting outside her body, and crash out, I’d never seen her so irate before.

Yaya was a damn good mother. Whether we were together or not, I’ll give credit where credit was due and always give her the flowers that she’d rightfully deserved, and say that if I died, and came back in another lifetime, I would choose her again to be the mother of my children.

She was loving towards them, soft, very attentive, and she showed up.

She played all roles, whether that be a teacher, doctor, therapist, whatever hat that she needed to wear, she would do that.

In the short four months that we had Sarai, the bond that the two of them shared was beautiful.

Yaya used to get matching outfits for the two of them, and that shit would be adorable as fuck when Yaya would give Sarai little spa dates at the house, where she would just lay her down on the bed, giving her little massages.

To have that little girl removed from our life so quickly, it shook our marriage.

Yaya didn’t lose her mind in the sense that my mom had when my father was killed, but she grieved by pushing a nigga away.

In the beginning, she was open, and she let me be there for her, but as time went on, I felt like she started treating me like it was my fault that Sarai was no longer here, when nobody was to blame for it.

Our daughter passed away from SIDS. It was no villain in that shit.

The only villain was a bunch of pain, heartbreak, and silence that took place between us.