(File photo)
They tell us we are resilient, but they never mention that resilience is just a prettier word for the scars left behind by a thousand goodbyes.
I was born in North Carolina but I don’t say I’m from there. I lived there for about 7 years but no one in my family lives there so I just say I’m from Florida even though I’ve only lived there for probably 3 years. When we lived in the states the absence of my dad wasn’t rare, he was always deployed. I learned early that “Dad” was a voice on a grainy line, and “Home” was a place where we waited for the military to tell us where to go. But when the orders came for us to move the world just became more chaotic.
I have seen exotic animals in the wild in the deserts of Africa and I have traced the iron of the Eiffel Tower against a European sky. I’ve traveled to people’s dream destinations at only 16 and seen more than most people my age. To an outsider, my life is a gallery of postcards and wonderful sights. But to me, those postcards are just pieces of paper. Every city I’ve loved is a place I can never truly go back to, because the people who made those cities bearable are scattered like fish across the seas. There’s an expiration date in any place you live no matter how much you love it.
I have never had a friendship that survived 4 years because of this. I have spent my life building connections out of sand, knowing the tide of orders to another place would eventually rise to wash them away. While ordinary children have their heights carved into the same wooden doorframe for 18 years, I have spent my life scanning new cafeterias, figuring out new languages, and rehearsing the same hollow introduction. I don’t have a childhood best friend. I have a graveyard of digital ghost towns, group chats that went silent in 2022, voices that I can’t quite hear anymore and faces I can no longer recognize.
For 4 years I have been anchored here on this island, a witness to a disappearing class. I have stood on the curb and watched the moving trucks swallow the lives of everyone I grew to love. I watch them go, and I stay behind. I look at the sea of faces in the hallways and realize I am surrounded by strangers who replaced all the people I once knew.
People ask me where I’m from, and the question feels like a bruise. I have no soil to claim. I have no hometown to pine for. I am a citizen of everywhere and a resident of nowhere. My only home isn’t a building or a zip code. It is the small circle of my family. They are the only ones the military cannot take away from me. They are my only borders, my only steady ground. We are a family of five, traveling through a world that refuses to let us plant roots. I look at the strangers who will walk across the graduation stage beside me and the ghosts of the friends who should have been there. I’ve been having to fit my whole life in cardboard boxes and having to learn the hallways of homes that were never mine. Though on paper my life seems like a dream, once you live it you would yearn for a place to call home. I would trade every sunset I have seen across the whole world for one porch light that never has to be turned off, a friend that’s known me since elementary school and one single, quiet street where I could finally, for the first time in my life, simply, stay.
