Five Years

It has just dawned upon me that i have lived in this state for a good five years now. I remember coming up here, and actually being in this state sometime in August.

I had been living in Texas, on Fort Hood, all the way up to July, enjoying my summer, though only half-heartedly, for i knew that at the end of July i was to up and move to here.

All my life i have been moving to heres and leaving behind theres.

Not all of you know, and don't worry, this is not going to be some sob story or a "please feel bad for me" story, just what it is like to consistently move from place to place, only knowing it for a handful of years.

It is usually the same thing. You move to a place, starting out fresh. You get to know your neighbors, which can either go one way or the other. Sometimes you like them, sometimes you hate them. Sometimes you feel indifferent to them, and then like them, hate them, or continue to not care about them. You met other people, you go to your new school. Things progress like that.

Before you know it, a year has passed, then two years, then three, and so on.

By now, you know people. You no longer associate names with people, you associate actions, behaviors with people.

And then it comes.

One day your father walks in the door. It seems like every other day that he's walked in the door wearing his army fatigues and boots, and other military paraphanalia. Only, you can sense that it is different.

And it is.

He has come home with orders to move to a whole new military base.

And once again, life changes. Or, more to the point, perspective changes.

These people, with whom you know by action and behavior, become growing strangers. Now the task comes to know them less and less. You have to. It's the way of these things. The dissassociation begins.

One of the things i remember about the move to here was that i swore to myself i would never get moved again because of the military's orders to my father.

Well, wouldn't you know it, i was actually right this time. For two reasons:

1. He retired from the military


2. My parent's got divorced and now he lives out with the wallabies.

...

I live here now. For the first time, i can actually think of here and there as having merged together. I think for the past year i have felt a strange sensation of something that is suppose to happen, is suppose to be, but hasn't happened. Now i think i understand what that strange sensation was.

I think my body, my me, has been wondering when the man with the camos and boots was going to walk back in the door and give us that o' so glorious news that we are going to uproot.

Well, at least that explains one of the many strange sensations that i get from time to time.

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