Trying, for X, meant reading self-help books. It meant crying on Instagram Live. It meant making music that oscillated between lullaby and threat. It meant failing publicly, apologizing incompletely, and dying before the apology could mature into action.
Here’s a deep, reflective write-up on the concept of — not just as a literal offspring, but as a metaphor for legacy, trauma, and the unfinished work of healing. The Unborn Future of a Broken Star: On XXXTentacion’s Child In the summer of 2018, the world lost Jahseh Onfroy—XXXTentacion—at just 20 years old. He was gunned down in a Deerfield Beach motorcycle dealership, a violent end to a life already riddled with chaos, abuse, genius, and contradiction. But months before his death, he had spoken of wanting a son. Not as a legacy in the traditional sense, but as a chance to give what he never had: stability, gentleness, and a childhood free from fear. xxx tentacion child
How does a child reconcile a father who wrote “Revenge” and “Jocelyn Flores” but also faced credible accusations of domestic violence? How does he mourn someone he never met, yet whose absence shaped every room he enters? Trying, for X, meant reading self-help books
In the end, “XXXTentacion’s child” is a reminder that legacy is not what you leave behind , but what you leave inside someone who never asked to carry it. And perhaps the most radical act—for Gekyume, for fans, for all of us shaped by broken idols—is to hold grief and accountability in the same hand, and keep walking toward a different state. He was gunned down in a Deerfield Beach
But for Gekyume, it is literal. He is the silence after the scream. He is the question mark at the end of a violent, tender, unfinished sentence. Will he carry the trauma forward, or will he break the cycle? Will the world allow him to be a child, or will they demand he become a symbol? In a leaked voicemail, Jahseh once said: “If I die, I want my son to know I tried. I really tried.”
That child, Gekyume Onfroy, was born posthumously in January 2019. To the public, he is a symbol. To those who loved Jahseh, he is both a continuation and a question mark. Jahseh chose the name Gekyume himself—a word he coined to mean “a different state” or “next universe.” It was not just a name, but a philosophy. In the months before his death, X had been attempting to shift his own state: from abuser to advocate, from rage to meditation, from street politics to spiritual exploration. His final album, ? , was littered with questions about identity, redemption, and whether people can truly change. Gekyume was meant to be the answer—a living embodiment of the man Jahseh wanted to become, not the one he had been.
So Gekyume’s burden is not to defend or condemn his father. It is simply to live—messy, complex, allowed to change. The deepest tribute he can pay is not to become a rapper or a saint, but to become a person who knows that love and harm can coexist in the same story, and that choosing the former is not weakness, but the hardest kind of strength.