couldn’t get her out. I don’t know where rent’s coming from next month. We’ll get an extra month if we get evicted, but shit, we been in this house our whole lives. Your pictures are still up. I still have to see you everywhere in here. So we’re not just gonna go. We been here our whole lives. We don’t have anywhere to go.
You know what’s funny? I’m all, like, street and shit in real life. But online I don’t talk like that, like I am now, so it feels weird to. Online I try to sound smarter than I am. I mean I choose what I type carefully, cuz that’s all people know about me. What I type, what I post. It’s pretty weird on there. Here. The way you don’t know who people are. You just get their avatar names. Some profile picture. But if you post cool shit, say cool shit, people like you. Did I tell you about the community I got into? The name of the place, the online community is: Vunderk0de. It’s fucking Norwegian. You probably don’t know what code is. I got way into it after you died. I didn’t feel like going out or going to school or nothing.
When you spend enough time online, if you’re looking, you can find some cool shit. I don’t see it as that much different from what you did. Figuring out a way around a big fucking bully system that only gives those that came from money or power the means to make it. I learned from YouTube how to code. Shit like JavaScript, Python, SQL, Ruby, C++, HTML, Java, PHP. Sounds like a different language, right? It is. And you get better by putting in the time and taking to heart what all the motherfuckers have to say about your abilities on the forums. You have to know how to tell the difference. Whose criticism to take and whose to ignore. Long story short, though, is that I got hooked into this community, and I realized I could get whatever I wanted. Not drugs and shit. I mean I could but that’s not what I want. The 3-D printer I got was itself printed by a 3-D printer. No shit, a 3-D printer printed by a 3-D printer. Octavio fronted me the money.
Part of what kills me about you being gone is that I never really said anything to you. Even when you emailed me. I didn’t even really know how much I wanted to say to you until the day you left. Until I felt that feeling of losing you on the lawn out there, right on that same spot where that boy’s blood stained the grass. But you showed me. I knew how much you loved me. You did shit like, like how you got me that expensive-ass Schwinn. Probably used to be some hipster’s bike, you probably stole it, but still, you stole it for me, and in some ways that’s even better than if you bought it. Especially if it was from one of those white boys trying to take Oakland over from the West. You should know they haven’t made it to the Deep East yet. Probably never will. Shit’s mean out here. But everything from High Street to West Oakland, that shit seems doomed to me. Anyway, I mostly see Oakland from online now. That’s where we’re all gonna be mostly eventually. Online. That’s what I think. We’re already kinda moving in that direction if you think about it. We’re already like fucking androids, thinking and seeing with our phones all the time.
You might wanna know more about some other shit, like, what’s going on with Mom. She gets out of bed more now. But she just moves to the TV. She looks out the window a lot too, peeks out the curtains like she’s still waiting for you to come home. I know I should be around her more, but she makes me feel hella sad. The other day she dropped a votive candle on the kitchen floor. Shit shattered, and she just left it there in pieces. Like shit’s broken but we can’t just leave it broken, all out there in the living room like your picture on the mantel, shit feels like it cuts me whenever I see it, how you graduated from high school and we all thought shit would be okay from then on because you did.
After you died I had this dream. It