Chapter 1: Family First
Hello, my name is Shi (or Shine if you’re my mom). I’m a romantic that loves hugging trees, being close to bodies of water, and reading manga. I’m a 16-year-old caramel-skinned young lady, with loving parents and large spiraling curly hair. I get lost in daydreams quite easily and have more erotic fantasies than I’d care to mention. My ideas about love have always been...IDEALISTIC. Some may even call it Rose-colored. I had no boyfriend, no prospects, no one throwing rocks at my second-story window at night, and yet I found myself having the most dramatic visions of my long-lost muscular soulmate, whisking me off my feet and taking my virginity after I’ve made him wait from Junior year to our graduation night to deflower me. I mean those are the thoughts I would have. Picnics and lunches with our family. Beach trips and elaborate ceremonial ways he would ask me to our school dances each year. I was obsessed and HE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE A FACE. I blame this idealism on my folks. My parents wrote the blueprint on being the loveliest of lovebirds. My dad always says “I prayed for a great woman, but God brought me the sun in human form. Look at her. Look how she lights up the room with her being” and my mom, being the spell making romantic she was, would always stare at him deeply and with great yearning, get teary-eyed, and grin the most beautiful grin. And they’d find an excuse to leave while they had a passionate make-out session or a quickie where everyone in the house could hear them. Like damn guys, really? I guess having parents that adored each other wasn’t all bad. No bad Christmases where the mother always ends up crying cause the dad gets too drunk and eventually ends up saying something mean about her or her mom. No separate households because of divorce. No secret arguments in the bathroom, where their really loud whispers would seep through the door. Just normal, highly sexed, highly passionate, it was love at first sight, and sex on their first date, kind of parents. They just refused to live by anyone else’s rules but their own. When they found each other, they didn’t have to “make it work”, it just somehow did with them. What was understood, was understood. Always. Their connection made them very attractive. Couples wanted to know their secret, be them, and fuck them. But they only had eyes for each other, and I think that’s what made them more attractive, that no matter what, they only wanted one another. You know how in the media, you rarely get to see beautiful black couples, with a devoted marriage, great entrepreneurial careers, and smart capable children? That just so happens to be us, well on a normal day. My mom is a “witch” by western standards of thinking. But people who KNOW, are aware that she is just a highly skilled healer. She uses her knowledge of what grows from the earth to heal others. She made it a career. She used the income from selling “potions” and “spells”, to start her own yoga studio. They specialize in reiki healing there. She’s a wonder. 5′11, long-legged and a decedent of the Mississippi black Indians on her dads’ side and the Louisiana Creoles on her mother’s. Her skin was the color of night, eyes the shade of deep amazonite. You could find yourself in a trance if you ever saw her walking the street. My dad, well he was the shade of black that came right AFTER white-passing. Lol. His family was all from Virginia. He happened to be the third-best neurosurgeon in America and after reaching a point in his professional life where he could make his own decisions, he moved us to a medium (as opposed to small) sized town named Chelsea and started his practice. I have a brother too. His name is Charlie. Charlie Clover. He walks a fine median between frying ants with his magnifying glass, and always winning the spelling bees in his class. lol. He’s five and a genius. Mom always makes us breakfast before school, she was a free spirit type but highly domestic, and thrived knowing she had a lover and the children they made out of their love, to attend to daily. Waffles. We consumed waffles a lot. I have only two friends: Kenya and Reva. They are the sisters that I never had. My mom says that 2 good solid friends are all I’ll ever need. “You can’t share your energy with everybody baby” she would always tell me. Touche mom. Touche.
