Double Dragons

*still drafting but wanted it published on my brothers birthday*

July 9th, 1990

I love my brother Christopher. Today is my oldest brother’s 35th birthday. 🎂 🥳 🎉

I was raised with my 2 younger (half) brother’s. (Half meaning genetically, but definitely not due to a lack of love. We’re just brothers.) Their mother, my dad’s 2nd wife raised me. I lived with them. In order to have a relationship with my father, I had to go thru her and call her mom.

… I’m PTSD and Manic Depressive, yet ive never been to war. Its because my home life was also a war zone. I was beat into calling my stepmother “mom” and mentally brainwashed into thinking we were a core family unit for most of my life. So the depths of my love and riches of my soul including the love for family and the love for a mother were geared toward my stepmother family and her extended family.

Back when I was 5 in 1990 and Christopher was born, he quickly became one of my earliest bestfriends. We were inseparable mainly because it was both of our first experiences with having a sibling.

I’ve a 20 year older sister (who’s birthday is 7/17) through my biological mother, but obviously because of the age difference and the family rearrangement I wasn’t raised with her.

So up through our younger brother Corey’s arrival 18 moths later, Chris and I were thick as thieves. I was a hero of his and, and he mine.🩵 And as his older brother, if he didnt know I was gonna teach ’em!🩵As brothers are supposed to be. We’re were kids cultivating #blackboyjoy together despite all odds. Silver-plated spoon negroes.

We were kids in the 90s growing up. He was my first video game partner. We’d play all the video games together, including Mario kart, double dragon, and we LOVED us some Power Rangers.

-I remember at summer camp when we each got portable gaming systems called game gears with a plethora of games, because another kid was excluding us when sharing. That was a powerful moment when our parents instilled and reinforced in us that we too were worthy.

There were rough patches because childhood isnt always easy, for either of us im sure. Growing up through the 90s, for me personally, homophobia was rampant. If asked, myself and numerous others who are gay today would swear we weren’t gay for safety reasons. It also wouldn’t be until my adult life that I’d understand how homophobic the black community is, and that not only am I targeted by white racist but black homophobes as well.

So between how I was treated at school, or rather how the world continues to treat people like myself currently; And the family abuse, I wasn’t always the perfect brother. Still, as we got older into our adult lives we’d discuss such issues and would be decently close (along with our youngest brother Corey.)

-comedy club. In his adult life he decided to try ameteur night at our local comedy club. As his older brother, not only did i bring people but I sat front row center not only for moral support but i foresaw and understood that if he got nervous he would see something familiar and roast me as he does at home if he needed. That’s exactly what happened, I was the butt of his jokes for a crowd of spectators, willingly.

– He’d surprise me on my 26th birthday with VIP Lady Gaga tickets because she was lgbt friendly. i wasn’t even a fan of Gaga until after I saw The Monster Ball in Louisville, KY. My father would later mention the expensive gesture in front if my stepmother and she almost choked.

somewhere in our adult life things changed, Chris and Corey would start introducing themselves as brothers without including me. I believe its due to cultural black homophobia up to and including my stepmother planting negative connation in their (my father and siblings heads.) It just seemed that whenever my stepmother mother had a mood swing or acted scared of me, here came my father and brothers attacking me under the fallacy of since they loved her then surely she couldn’t be lying on me.🙄😒 . Anytime they’d attack me because she’d act scared and when they werent looking she always smirk.

So i was forced to love people who didn’t necessarily have to love me back, and anytime I pointed out a double standard it influenced my relationship with my father and I was scolded as “ungrateful.”

-There was a time when Christopher attacked me calling me a “faggot” and hitting me in my jaw and breaking my front tooth which i must get fixed every few years. I cant bite into foods such as apples nor corn cobbs anymore without it breaking.

-There was another time where they invited me to play basketball and he waited for the perfect opportunity to shove me into the metal basketball goal. My head slammed against it and I had a knot the size of a golf ball on my forehead. They gaslighted me and homophobically called me “sensitive” for being injured.

-I had an entire mental and physical collapse during 2020, weeks later my family left me in it. I live minutes away from my stepmother and father’s house, the house i was raised in, yet none of them have checked on me and wouldn’t return my calls nor texts. I had to reconsider everything and anything I thought to be true, including my family.

Thanks to my indomitable spirit and my ability to shed social conditioning and relearn core values without the help of those I loved including my extended family. (My immediate family would paint this “crazy” narrative bout me when i’d finally respond to their abuse. Which was easy to believe considering black homophobic prejudices.)

I mean to say, I basically live across the street so where were you when I was sick and there after? If it weren’t for the empathy of beautiful white people like my middle school teacher and some closer friends- I wouldn’t be here.

I remember writing this in September of 2024: “I cried again in my sleep last night. I wake up fine 🙂. Again, Dis shit is WILD.
I remember seeing my step-grandmother June Florence in my dream at the store and offered her love (I was beat as a child into loving these people.) She was indifferent of course.

Then, I turn and see my brothers in their child-like state and I broke down cause I miss n love them SO much (I’m crying rn again.) I just hope they know how much their big brother loves them, forever. It’s a shame that in this life their mother taught them to hurt me. I hope they remember how SUPER they really are. 💙💚🩵 #unspokenautobiography  #TheCharlesShow #PsychedelicSupherHeroes

Yet we dont talk and here’s why he stays in my dms every other holiday. With love.

there were times when my stepmother would influence my father to file a false miw. When that didnt stick, she acted scared and filed a family restraining order, both of which where I’d be snatched out of bed by 3 or 4 cops at a time. It cycled 7 tears later, 1st I was homeless then I had mental collapse. My parents would weaponize the legal system against me.

And not to make this birthday blog to my brother about family trauma, but I cant help but feel in my soul that their mother wouldn’t have ever been able to do that to me if they’d stood up for me.

I corrected all 3 of my parents when they were wrong, So what’s wrong with my brothers then? Since they’re so opinionated about everything else in the world. And where were you (anytime I needed u? Homelessness? Mental collapse?) And, where have you been?

So, why are you in my texts and dms pulling on my heart strings during cliche holidays and birthdays? It must be so you can do me wrong again because with as much love that I have in my heart no one can stand on my legacy and inheritance and act like they’re doing me any favors. Complacent and compliant with some delusion where your gay brother doesn’t belong. I dont need that kind of love.

And to think , I argued with my birth mother as she died of cancer about having 3 parents. My mother basically died yelling at me about Lisa not being my mother… and after my mother Janeè passed,Lisa decided to act scared of me (like alot of women do to get their way) and have me thrown out of the family. So ultimately making me call Lisa mom was a flex on my own mother while she was alive. Once Janee’ died, it didn’t matter anymore.

love is an action and until you correct the course of history and do right by me, then all you do is merely performative- a desperate effort of ridding yourself of guilt. Thus, i’ll love you from a distance. I’ll root for you in prayer and thought, but I cant let offspring, pawns, nor puppets of my abusers anywhere near me only for history to repeat itself. Im at peace with protecting myself first.

Happy birthday tho, my dear brother. You are forever loved, and when God asks me if we had love, I’d say “We most certainly did!”🩵