A first-person monologue describing a life-changing shooting at age 17. The speaker recounts being shot multiple times after a minor conflict, an ambulance failing to arrive, a friend driving him to the hospital where surgeons removed two bullets and left one, and his father’s defeated reaction as the third son shot in the family. The piece emphasizes the normalization of gun violence in the speaker’s environment and its emotional impact on family.
When I was, like, 17 years old, I'll never forget that day. I was standing on the corner and I got into, like, a minor conflict. And then I got shot multiple times. That was probably the most serious turning point in my life. After I got shot, they called ambalans, and the ambulance never came. And my friend, he was like, look, I'm gonna have to take you to the hospital because the ambulance is just not gonna come. And I remember getting in the car and he's just like, you know, breathe. Like, you gotta take these deep breaths. You know, this is how you're gonna navigate the pain. The reason he was able to do that, he had got shot the year prior. So the gun viol, it was so much a part of, like, the culture that I grew up in that I didn't think about what was happening inside of me after I got shot. And so I get to the hospital, they take two of the bullets out of my leg and they leave one bullet in, and basically they patch me up. And I remember my dad coming to the hospital. And at this point, I was the third of my brothers to be shot. I'll never forget this look on my dad's face of like. It was almost a look of, like, defeat of, like, how do I save my boys, you know?
