OG Sanchez “A New York Love Story”

FAMILY TIES

Long Island NY 2010 (16 years old)

“Dang, where are they?”

It's already 2 AM and moms and pops still haven't hit me up since noon. Usually by now they would have been home already or at least had checked up on me to let me know they were running late.

So the fact that I haven't heard from them in over 12 hours , is really starting to get to me. My mind is making me think the worse but my heart is telling me to just wait out a little bit longer before I call in the troops. I wouldn't want to cost a mass hysteria over nothing just yet.

I haven't heard from my brother Neal either although I've been texting him all day to see if he knew of their whereabouts. But Neal is always MIA, so with him, it didn't worry me too much when he doesn’t answer.

But my parents were a different story.

Ever since I can remember, no matter what, my parents were up to, they always made sure that their only daughter was set. Not only with materialistic things, which was cool but also with the love that only you can get from your parents & no one else.

But with their line of work and with situations like these , I was always on high alert. The street life is chosen for only those that can handle it & my parents knew they were chosen from the moment they were brought into this world.

Born into a drug dealing family, this type of life was the only life my father knew of and when he made his way into New York City from the Dominican Republic, he came with the intention of becoming one of the biggest and best to ever do it.

He met his Queen, my mother when he was 30 years old ; an off duty nurse from the Bronx who saved his life when she found him bleeding to death from a gunshot wound in an alleyway behind her complex. He had begged her not to take him to the local hospital which she obliged and the rest is history. She had my brother just a year later and I came 4 years after that.

My parents tried their hardest not expose us too much to the streets by moving the family to Long Island from Brooklyn. But as much as they tried, Neal always found his way back. They stopped trying with him due to the fact that it became so natural for him and with how much he wanted to be like pops ; it just got to the point where it was better to just let him be then make enemies with him and not have him in our lives at all.

With me , it had always been different. My father wasn’t playing that. Neither did my mother. Which is why with me, they drilled into my head how important it was to go to school and be something better than they ever was. Their words , not mines. Because although they were probably the biggest and most powerful couple, this side of NY ever seen ; They were the most loving, loyal , caring and most charismatic people I knew.

And I wanted to be just like them.

****

I was startled from my sleep when I heard loud banging at the front door.

“The hell, what time is it?”

Noticing that it was a quarter past 5AM, I ran to the door to see who it was , nervous as hell as to who it could be at this hour. My parents nor Neal wouldn’t have been banging at the door like that.

When I reached the door and looked through the peephole, I was surprised to see my Tio Juan with a frantic look on his face. Immediately my heart began to sink...I opened the door as quickly as I could, trying to unlock all the deadbolts one by one but my fingers were shaking so hard that it was taking me longer than I had wanted to fully open the door for him.

Once I opened the door, he blew right past me barely looking my way.

“Maya, grab your things, we gotta go” he said walking towards my father's office.

“Tio...slow down..what’s going on?”

He was moving and talking so fast around the house , I barely got any words in. He was collecting all the stashes of money that my parents had around the house which made me even more terrified because from the knowledge that I knew, when something big is going down, the stashes had to be moved out the house immediately.

“Tio, what the f*** is going on?”

This immediately stopped him in his tracks because ain't no 16 year old niece of his was going to curse at him like that. His mad expression changed, when he realized that he hasn't been telling me anything concrete.

He dropped the bags that were in his hands at his feet & with quick motions he reached me and held me in his arms while his body started to tremble.

“I'm so sorry mi nina…Your parents were killed tonight”