God of War: The Culmination of Love and the Fight Back From the Other Side of Life (Proofed, don’t publish)

“I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me… Doesn’t seem to want to.” Atreus spoke those words to his deceased mother, Faye, about his father, Kratos, back in God of War (2018) during her wake.––I felt them on a visceral level. Fifteen years ago, after my mother left her body behind with me in the hospital room, I said the same thing of my own father. We don’t communicate well. I try to talk with him. He only talks at me. Now, we don’t talk at all. But this isn’t about that. Not yet. This story takes place 6 years earlier in 2005, at a slam poetry competition on Livingston Campus at Rutgers University. A competition I lost badly because I did a poem that the audience did not find funny, at all. It was bad yall. So bad, that I stayed in bed for 2 weeks. So bad, that 21 years later, I can still recount every face not laughing in the audience. After the slam, as I try to slink away, I’m stopped by one of the performers. A bald 6′ foot tall white dude with a level 35 dad bod belly, who (ironically enough) in the slam, referred to himself as a sexy ass bitch. Which had the room shaking with laughter, and that tracks since this man was on HBO Def Poetry Jam. He tells me two things. That my poem was funny and his name. Big Mike. I thank him and as we give each other dap, I am unaware of how much of an impact Big Mike will have over the next 21 years of my life. A few months later, he’ll invite my friends and I to perform with him, then to perform at the school where he teaches. I w…