The last time I saw my daughter was on June 6th, 1996; that was two years ago, three months and six days. Her mother took her and moved to another state because, as it was put by some fat-assed lawyer, I was in a toxic environment, living with my parents and still not graduated from high school by, pretty much, dropping out and going to work as a mechanic in Airway Heights.

Yeah, home life was a bitch, but I was trying to get out by trying to take classes at night in an attempt to get my GED. My parents were not supporting in my attempt, and they chastised me every single fricking day over things that I didn’t comprehend at the time. No, I had no sense of responsibility, as I was thir-damn-teen at the time.
No, I didn’t have any idea what would happen, again, I was a kid who felt they were invincible.
Yes, I called her every single derogatory thing I could think of when she told me because, well, I was, well, an asshole.
There, I said it.
My mom would would yell at me for swearing, but then she’d praise Jesus that I had finally had an epiphany.
No, I had the epiphany on that sunny June day when they took my first-born away in a car to Mississippi.

I won’t badmouth her mother, as she had some type of psychotic break and was in a mental hospital. My own mother tried to get custody of her granddaughter but the surviving members of the Moone’s, my former girlfriend’s family, wouldn’t allow it and her older sister, Alexis, took my child and her mother away.

They sent several pictures of Elainya—I wasn’t given an option in naming my daughter—and as much as I appreciated it, I hated seeing them; as they were always with just her, or with Alexis and Wesley, her uncle, and never with her mother.
Never a mother and daughter picture, which I kind of wanted to see.
There was a fleeting moment that I thought that we could get back together; after we were stabilized. After the issues of high school were over.

It was over a year later I learned why her mother, Cherry, was never in any of the pictures: she had died.