The View from the 21st Floor

21 floors above Pittsburgh—visual art exploring what the Diddy documentary stirred up about trauma, the hood, and understanding why people stay. Homewood's still here, even from this height.

I am in a beautiful hotel on the 21st floor in Pittsburgh, overlooking the city that raised me—this steel city that bends but doesn't break, just like the people it makes.

Homewood first. The hood that taught me everything that matters. Then Wilkinsburg. Then Penn Hills. Blackness everywhere—beautiful, struggling, surviving Blackness, slowly moving up from the bottom to what we thought was the top. But now that I know what the top actually looks like? That wasn't it. We were just less at the bottom. Still, because we didn't know any better, it was amazing. Each move felt like victory. Each new zip code felt like escape, like we were climbing toward something promised but never quite delivered.

From up here, I can see downtown Pittsburgh. The stadium where the Steelers play. The park. The gleaming skyline that looks good in postcards. I can't see Homewood from here. Can't see Wilkinsburg or Penn Hills—my hood is out there somewhere, invisible from this height, beyond the view these windows offer.

But I know exactly where it is. Feel it in my bones. Carry it in my walk.

I'm from the hood, will always be hood—no matter how this bougie exterior presents itself, no matter how many floors up I climb. I know my roots. They run deep as the steel that holds this city together, deep as the rivers that cut through it. And one thing about me: I never forget where I came from. Never. The hood stays in you—in the way you move through rooms, the way you read danger before it arrives, the way you know when to speak and when to stay silent. You can take me out the hood, but the hood lives in me. Always has. Always will.

The Party, The Return, The Reckoning

I came back to Pittsburgh for my friend's 50th birthday party. Fifty—that number haunts me now, follows me like a song I can't stop humming. The party was love wrapped in laughter, full of people who remember who I was before I learned to code-switch, before I discovered that survival sometimes looks like transformation.

Tonight I came home to this hotel room a little tipsy, my body loose with champagne and memory, and I finished binging 50 Cent's new documentary on Diddy—Sean Combs: The Reckoning on Netflix.

Whew, Lawd.

Watching someone you idolized fall isn't like watching a stranger stumble—it's watching a piece of your own mythology crumble, watching the poster on your childhood bedroom wall catch fire. I believe a lot of what I saw. The receipts don't lie. The pattern repeats itself too consistently. Too many voices saying the same thing in different keys but harmonizing toward one truth.

Still, I watched with both eyes open—one eye on the truth, one eye on the vendetta. Because I know 50 Cent and Sean Combs have history, bad blood, beef that's older than some of the people watching. So I remind myself: truth can be true and still be slanted. Facts can be facts and still be weaponized. The story told depends on who's telling it.

What the Hood Knows About Survival

Then the jurors started talking about Cassie, and something in my chest cracked wide open.

You see, I grew up around women who stayed. My mother stayed. My sister stayed. My cousins stayed. Women who loved men who hurt them, who kept going back like salmon swimming upstream toward the thing that will kill them. I learned about trauma bonds before I learned algebra—learned the mathematics of abuse before I understood multiplication. I learned what it looks like when love and fear become so tangled you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

I learned the mental space those women occupy—that cage that looks like a room, that trap that feels like home, that prison where the bars are made of promises and apologies and "I'll change" and "it won't happen again" until it does, until the pattern becomes the relationship, until staying feels safer than leaving even though staying is what's killing you.

Now, I don't expect jurors to know this psychology. They're not trained in trauma. They're just people—regular people trying to make sense of something that makes no sense unless you've lived it, unless you've been the one staying when everyone outside is screaming why don't you just leave?

But watching them say it—

She wanted the freak-offs. She wanted to come back. She could leave at any time.

Even the defense attorney said it, and rage rose in me like flood water, like the Allegheny River after heavy rain, threatening to overflow its banks.

When I Saw Myself in the Hallway

Because watching him beat Cassie in that hotel hallway took me back.

Took me back to my mother—the sound of fists on flesh, the rhythm of violence like a song you can't unhear. The crying that's too tired to be loud. The apologies that mean everything and nothing. The silence the next morning when we all pretend yesterday didn't happen because acknowledging it would mean having to do something about it, and doing something feels more dangerous than doing nothing.

Took me back to my stepfather's hands—equal opportunity hands that didn't discriminate, that found me too if I was loud or quiet or breathing wrong or just there. I caught it for being too much, not enough, too gay, too alive.

Took me back to my cousin being dragged by her hair down the street—dragged like luggage, like she was something to be moved instead of someone to be loved.

And she stayed. Married him.

I judged her. Judged all of them. Thought I was different, smarter, stronger. Thought I would leave the first time, thought I had too much self-respect to accept that treatment.

Until I didn't leave.

Until I dated someone who had power over me—someone who knew exactly which buttons to push, who could make me feel small and grateful at the same time, who convinced me that their violence was my fault, my failure, my problem to solve.

When did I become the person I judged? When did I become the one making excuses, explaining away red flags, staying when every rational part of me knew I should run?

Unless you've been there—unless you've felt your brain rewire itself around someone else's violence, unless you've experienced the way abuse becomes normal and leaving becomes impossible—you cannot judge. You might never understand. And maybe you're blessed enough that you won't have to.

But I understand.

I understand Cassie.

I understand my mother.

I understand my sister.

I understand my cousin.

I understand every person who's ever heard "why didn't you just leave?" and felt the shame of not having an answer that makes sense to people standing outside the cage looking in.

The Trial That Wasn't About This But Was

I know the trial wasn't about domestic violence. The charges had other names—trafficking, conspiracy, racketeering. Legal words for crimes that carry weight in courtrooms. But the violence was still there, still present, still the foundation everything else was built on.

And the way those jurors talked about it—not cruelly, not meanly, just ignorantly—the way they couldn't comprehend why Cassie didn't just leave—it broke something in me.

They did nothing wrong. They're not bad people. They just don't know what they don't know. They viewed it through the lens their life gave them—a lens that's never had to focus on trauma bonds or survival math or the way your brain lies to you and calls it love.

I don't blame them.

But it still hurt.

Still hurts.

Because they don't understand that leaving isn't an option when your survival instinct has been hijacked. Don't understand that "wanting it" and being conditioned to want it are different countries speaking different languages. Don't understand that trauma bonds are called bonds for a reason—they tie you up, hold you down, keep you returning like a homing pigeon to the place that's destroying you.

My heart was under siege watching that documentary. This hotel pillow—soft, expensive, twenty-one floors removed from the streets that made me—absorbed tears therapy has been trying to excavate for years. Tears that live below language, below logic, in the place where little boys learn that violence is sometimes how love gets expressed.

The Apology That Wasn't

We all fall. We all fail. We all hurt people we don't mean to hurt and break things we don't mean to break. I'm not naive enough to believe in perfect people. Life is messier than morality tales. People contain multitudes—good and bad, saint and sinner, all wrapped up in one contradictory body.

Diddy did apologize. Put out a video. Said the words. Hit all the beats an apology is supposed to hit.

But something was missing.

The apologies felt empty—like his eyes looked at times during that video, vacant, rehearsed, reading from a script someone else wrote. They weren't accompanied by sincerity. It felt like he needed to say things so he said them. Performance over confession. Public relations over genuine remorse.

I watched that apology and felt nothing shift. Nothing land. Nothing change.

What could he have done to make us see the truth? What would real accountability look like coming from a man that powerful, that protected, that used to consequence?

I don't know. Maybe there's nothing he could say that would feel real after what we saw. Maybe some things are too broken to fix with words. Maybe when you spend decades hurting people and hiding behind lawyers and NDAs and power, there's no apology big enough to carry the weight of what you've done.

But what I do know is this: an apology without changed behavior is just noise. Words without action are just public relations. And watching a powerful man perform remorse while his eyes stay empty isn't accountability—it's damage control.

That's not a man who's seen himself clearly. That's not a man transformed by reckoning. That's a man trying to survive his own consequences, trying to say the right thing so maybe the fall won't hurt as much.

And I'm tired of watching powerful men perform remorse they don't feel.

Twenty-One Floors Up

All I endured in the hood of Pittsburgh—all the violence witnessed, all the trauma absorbed like a sponge too young to know I was supposed to wring myself out—I sit now at the top of this stunning hotel, and that little Black queer boy inside me felt everything this weekend.

Felt Cassie's terror.

Felt my mother's resignation.

Felt my sister's desperation.

Felt my cousin's paralysis.

Felt my own shame at having stayed too long with someone who hurt me.

That boy from Homewood who learned that fists are sometimes love's language, who learned to duck when voices rose, who learned to make himself small so maybe the blows would miss—he's still here. Twenty-one floors up, crying into expensive pillows about things therapy keeps trying to heal but can't quite reach.

Because here's the thing nobody tells you about making it out: the view from the 21st floor doesn't erase what you saw from the ground. The height doesn't heal the wounds. The distance doesn't make the memories fade.

You carry it all with you. Every floor. Every victory. Every hotel room with a view.

I know my roots. Never forget where I came from. The hood taught me how to see through people, how to spot lies before they land, how to survive in rooms that weren't built for me. Taught me loyalty and code and the kind of strength you only learn when the world is trying to kill you and you refuse to die.

From the hood.

Will always be hood.

Even here. Especially here.

Twenty-one floors up, looking out at a city that can't see me back, and I understand now: healing doesn't come from forgetting. It comes from witnessing. From saying the truth out loud even when the truth sounds like crying, even when the truth makes jurors uncomfortable, even when the truth threatens to topple empires built on silence.

She didn't leave because leaving isn't that simple.

I didn't leave because leaving isn't that simple.

And trauma—trauma doesn't respect elevation.

But neither does survival.

And boo, I'm still here.