The Summer Recall

Prologue

Latifah

I am sitting here contemplating the state of the world. As I look around to see what the Pandemic brought to the surface. A lot of ugliness, greed, selfishness, impatience. One would think that something that affected us all, would be the very thing to unite us and force us to see our flaws and improve the state of the world.  It doesn’t matter that companies are trying to bring about the human touch, despite the upsurge of all the technology around us. It is disheartening to see that we are far gone from a time that just seemed simple and easy. As I contemplate, my mind drifts to a time in my life when everything seemed so complicated but looking back it wasn't at all.

The year was 2003,  I was in Atlanta to spend the summer that would change my life forever. My boy De-Shane was coming to spend the summer in Atlanta. My girl Kuukua decided not to go to Ghana for the summer and stick around. But with Dee coming as well I just had to be in Atlanta to spend time with him. We met in late 2000. My boy Drew, messaged me on MSN one day to tell me he would like for me to meet his friend who lived in the US at the time. I remember being so eager to meet him. After our first interaction, we were hooked. We would talk day and night. He would talk till late on my end and early morning on his end. He was my ying and my yang. I finally planned a trip to Atlanta to visit him and we had a blast.  We were inseparable. I felt I had met my twin. We did everything together on that trip. We would go to the cinema and play video games. We would go to the basketball court and play basketball until the street lights came on. He was patient with me whilst I shopped and often gave me recommendations on what would look good on me. That trip solidified our relationship. We were best friends for life. We even had a secret handshake. People would mistake us as a couple but we would laugh it off because we both knew our relationship was deeper than that. He was my soulmate and I was his. Not in a romantic sense but more like a Jonathan and David friendship from the Bible. Since that trip was so short we decided that the next year we would spend the whole summer together.  And here we are, June of 2003 and I am in Atlanta to spend the summer with my BFF. We knew it was going to be the best summer of our lives, if only we knew what this summer had in store for us…