Rain does not care about grief. It never does. It just falls heavy and cold and completely indifferent to the fact that you buried your son that same morning.
I still remember every single detail of that night. The way the sky had been holding its breath all day, gray and low, pressing down on Philadelphia like a fist. The way the air smelled like wet concrete and something bitter I could not name.
The way my dreadlocks were still pinned up from the funeral, neat and deliberate, the way I always kept them when I needed to look like I had it together. I did not have it together. My son, my Terrell, had been put in the ground that morning.
And I was standing in the rain outside of the house that used to belong to my son, with my bags at my feet, thrown there from a second-floor window. And the woman who threw them was standing at that window right now, looking down at me like a small declaration of war. “Go on now, Patrice.
Take your bags. Take your bad luck, and don’t come back to this house.”
I stood there in the rain. My face was calm, not because I was okay, but because I had learned a long time ago that showing pain to the wrong person is the same as handing them a weapon.
So I bent down. I picked up my bags one by one. And I walked.
I did not cry. I did not argue. I did not look back.
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Now, let’s go back to my story. My name is Patrice Freeman, and I was born in Philadelphia. Born in a house where the floorboards creaked in the hallway and the radiator knocked every winter like it was knocking to come in from the cold itself.
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