Memorial day 2011 was just like any other day, pretty normal. It was a monday off of school, which is always fantastic. And it was fantastic, until I got probably the worst news of my life. Five minutes after listening to some mainstream pop radio in my room alone, I found myself sitting silently in the family room with my brother and my parents. No one was talking. "Something has come up with work, and theres a big possibility we have to move." My dad sloppily blurted out.

Who tells their kid that?! Who decides they can uproot their kid after living in the same place for ten years and take them somewhere new?! The only thing I could think about was how awful a new school would be. School kind of sucks enough already, and I have never been new. The last time I moved I was three, three year olds don’t care. However, 13 year olds tend to. I do not know how long I cried, years probably. I hated my parents, and I spent most of my time hid away in my room or in a tree house stuck in my thoughts, finding comfort in knowing if things got bad enough I guess could always just jump. Drastic? Overly dramatic? Probably. But in my defense, this news didn’t even come out of left field, it came straight out of space, off the face of pluto most likely.

Knowing only one home, one friend group, one neighborhood, the same steady things throughout my life, left me unprepared. All of the above were suddenly likely to change. The following months were filled with unanswered questions "Why is this happening?" "Where are we going?" "When are we moving?" Soon after none of my questions were answered I decided it would be best to ignore it. Maybe if I pretend this isnt happening, it won’t actually happen..logical right? Regardless, things picked up, my parents looked at houses, we started packing things, memories were stashed into cardboard boxes labeled “living room” and “Miranda” as I desperately tried to look at every picture I had, trying to remember every moment, every bike ride and every fall I encountered in this town.

“People move all the time, Miranda.” Yeah well I know kids at school with parents in the military, they move a lot, but why did we have to hop on bandwagon? Why could I not just be the one kid who lives a boring unchanging life in a boring unchanging house and go to the same high school as everyone else I know? Despite my 13 year old wishes, I had to move, and I had to deal with it. I started at Lamar Middle School about three weeks into their school year, and let me tell you, being a new kid was not among one of my favorite things to be. I had to start completely over. I moved to a state I had only heard things about, most of those things involved horses and cowboy boots, which to my conformation, are both extremely prominent in the state (even if kids don’t actually ride their horses to school).

Weeks went by and eventually a few choice people knew my name, they even knew how to pronounce it right (like mer-on-duh.) A couple more weeks gave me a couple more friends, and a few years gave me a life that I could almost forget started in Seattle. Texas was never in my line of sight, but it invades every part of my life now, and not always in a bad way, which is pretty great I suppose.