I grew up in a ghetto-ish area. Not super ghetto, but it felt ghetto enough.

In junior high, you get the cholos and cholas after you, people you've never seen before chasing you down to jump you for no apparent reason. Fights happen at lunch and after school, and kids drop out and go to the alternative school next door. You learn to fight or hide.

In high school, you get a screwdriver stabbing, a stabbing by the bus stop, girls coming to school with their babies. Most families live on food stamps, a friend of mine's household income was only $8k annual.

In college, your friends and lovers are dealers, and you get all the drugs you want. You don't realize you've become addicted. Your date is late because they're caught up as a witness in a shooting outside a boba tea shop. You leave a party cuz someone brought a gun, and you start hearing more things. This street is claimed by that gang and that gang owns this street. A girl dies over some typical gang territory warfare on that street. Girls you know work in "coffee shops" where they serve you naked or in bikinis and that's how they hustle.

Since high school I've tried to get away. Moved back and forth across the state for school, even lived in San Ramon with relatives (one of the richest cities in the U.S.!), wine country, and elsewhere.

Sometimes I forget. I enjoy not having to worry about so much crime. Props to feeling safer. I enjoy a nice glass of wine and like to eat fancy a few times, and feel at ease and happy going through the motions of life.

And sometimes I'm sharply reminded. You hear on the news a shooting close to your parents' home. I go to a rich place and realize how crass I seem (and back in the hometown, I was even considered classy!), or something happens and your old tendencies and instincts resurface. Something made you mad? Fight that motherfucker! Cause a scene! And a voice inside your head is fighting those tendencies, saying "It ain't like that here, don't do that, don't act ghetto."

How do you escape? Are you ever set free?