Virtually five years that I haven’t seen parents, family and friends outside listening or watching them on a monitor from time to time. What it does is that I want to touch, grab their faces so much. Make sure that they’re real for real. Did this shit actually happen? Adopted by white people and shit? It’s so weird now. It’s hard.
Things are not going so well over there. Family disputes, conflicts that I don’t get. It’s whatever. My parents describe the sad state of the little neighborhood that I grew up in. There was many stores. You could buy vegetables, pencils, tools, toys, salami, horse meat, fabric, potato salad. A thriving boulangerie where people would line up on Sundays for one of the best baguette on earth, I’m not kidding. The boulangerie hold the fort for a while other businesses where disappearing but now it’s basically gone. All that is left open every day is a drug store, a pizza joint used as a front to sell cannabis and a bar tabac which sells cigarettes and alcohol. I told my parents on Skype thinking about Alfred in Atlanta, “hey, drugs are lucrative”. They nodded like they hadn’t made the connection between what was sold on that corner of one of my hometowns.