"I felt the tug on my sleeve and looked down to find him standing motionless. His mouth was moving but I couldn’t make out his words. His quiet body in the noisy room caught me off guard. I bent down to find his voice."
"I don’t know who this lady is... she waved at him and he made his way up to her. I thought their interaction would be the same as last time but I was wrong. "
"People around them act shocked. They are devastated. They say they didn’t see it coming; that they couldn’t have prevented it. But WE could have prevented it."
People in the community started blaming his mess on me, because I was a woman. “Joy, you’re the woman of the house, you need to get in there and throw some stuff away. It’s gross.”
"I had made many commitments to make drastic changes to my life before this day, but those empty words often resulted in nothing. I continued living my life the only way that I knew how."
