OCR Text |
Show bound my life as distant as my family. Unlike previous relocations, at the end of the day, I did not return through a guard gate to a house with walls painted the comforting hue of military white. Instead I found myself sharing a tiny dorm room with mustard yellow walls and a young woman named Lisa from Scottsbluff, Nebraska. She exposed me to The Nylons, frozen chocolate chip cookies, and eating disorders, but I would have found each on my own. By that time in my life I had moved eight times, lived on both coasts, an island, and never in a landlocked state. I can remember returning home from my second high school on the first day in our new military quarters and locating my mother amidst the boxes by the familiar sound of packing paper being unwrapped. She stood, in the laundry room, a giant box before her, slowly unwinding the paper from a glass I had used my entire life. Reaching for that glass, having my mom there unwrapping that glass as she had done many times before, made the rest possible. I would never recover from what I had missed in Chemistry, I would never find out if the boy left behind in Virginia liked me, and my junior year would go undocumented as I had missed school pictures in both schools, but I would survive as long as some part-a drinking glass, a bed, my brothers- remained constant like the surf. To college, I brought what fit in two suitcases. While others carried boxes filled with posters, stereos, and worn stuffed animals up the dorm stairs, my mom and I drove to the grocery and bought sodas for the mini-fridge. In two days, she had returned to Hawaii to be with my brothers when they started the school year. What had accompanied me in previous moves became reduced to the voices, worn thin from the journey under the ocean floor, of my parents when I called home on Sundays. At breakfast, I ate 225 |