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We live in a cold and dangerous world. That's just the way it is. No one is good, no one's kind, and no one is the saint that they pretend to be on TV. There's no such thing as those virtuous humanitarians. The world is dark and dusky, because the people that live in it are completely emotionless and empty too. When you grow up in the ghetto, in the slums of a ghetto, you see things you shouldn't see, hear things that aren't supposed to exist and feel the tremors of the world that should never be felt.
I remember when I was still an innocent kid, one with no sense of good or bad and right or wrong, just a regular six-year-old kid. Doing what any other kid would do, I was messing around in the sandlot in the playground, and in came a pretty girl. Only I didn't know she was pretty, I just knew she was a girl with a huge scar on her right forearm. I didn't even know her name; we were just two young kids enjoying the sun and sand. There were parents all around, people picnicking in the distance and these old people tanning. It was just a typical day to start off with, a day that would eventually spiral out-of-control into a memory that has scarred me even twenty years later. I was happily playing in the sand with a girl I met ten minutes ago, and less than two seconds later, there's a dead body next to me. It's still there, clear as rain, like the back of my hand, the image of that seventeen-year-old, lying dead on the grass, just inches away from me. Blood streaming through his long and curly hair and those cold glass eyes that will haunt me for the rest of my life: it's all still there, imprinted in my memory like an everlasting portrait. His clothes, his hat and his shoes were all drenched in his own blood. I had never seen so much blood in my life. Those gunshots I still hear in the dead of night when I wake up screaming, screaming like all those other jolly people that were in the park that day. But then again, that's just the way it is.
So now, as I return to that exact spot twenty years later, nothing's changed. The sandlot, the swings and the people are still in the exact spot I left them years ago. I don't mean the parents all around, the people picnicking in the distance and the old people tanning. I mean everyone gathered around a single dead body next to the sandlot. The whispers, the screams, the cries, nothing's changed, except, of course, the body. I walk closer, trying to catch a glimpse of today's unfortunate victim, and I shake my head in disgust. It's a pretty woman, dressed in a tank top and a miniskirt, with a huge scar on her right forearm. Like I said, nothing's changed. We still live in a cold and dangerous world.