It's Only Temporary

An essay we wrote over a picture we found in our boxes. This was an assignment for Expository II.

    Through out my life I have lived in twelve different houses in five different states. Houses and other places of residence are very temporary for me, as are most of the friendships that I’ve had over the years. I think in some ways I have always noticed the disconnection I have with the rest of the world around me. Although it wasn’t truly until eighth grade that I started analyzing the way I felt for the people that I was supposed to be closest to. Eighth grade being the year afer I had my strongest support beam was ripped from my stability base

    Recently we’ve found a box of photos hidden in the living room closet that we dug through. The set of pictures that hit closest to my emotions were the before and after pictures of our previous residence. In one picture the house is blue all over; in the next the house is brown with a pinkish sort of accent. Seeing these pictures made me think of just how temporary everything in my life has been, even that house in which I spent seven years of my life knowing I could go home to. Utterly impermanent.

    The first time I saw that house in person, was when I was four or five years old. The grass had overgrown the dirt lane—known as Columbine Lane—the paint was peeling off the sides of the house and one side was being torn down. I didn’t know then that it would become the one place that left a lasting imprint on my memory.

    Over the nine years of the house being in our ownership, of which I only spent seven of them there, the house was in a constant transformation. My parents put in a pair of dark stained, glass paneled, French doors off the side of their third/second story bedroom. For about a year the doors had absolutely no point as there was no porch outside them, but then my parents tore down the main floor porch and stairs to rebuild them. The new porch was set in front of the house and wrapped around the sun room to end at the corner to the side of the house. From there another porch was added out from over top the sun room out from the, before, useless French doors.

     The insides were on a constant change as well as we kept moving in and out, to and from other parts of our separate families. My Aunt Monica lived in the basement once and then the back room on the main floor. Also Aunt Christina lived in the basement for a time. The basement was more or less just for rough housing and laundry for a time. The main floor is where most of the action took place: from rows between my mom and my step sister, Natashia; to lively and hearty Thanksgiving get-togethers; to frivolous barbeques; to entertaining wedding receptions; to unsanctioned teenage parties. We were constantly switching rooms as well.

    Thinking of that after seeing those two pictures makes me realize that, while I didn’t move around as much as army brats, my perception on stability wasn’t all that stable. My first word was a name—not a title of a parent, or even my parent’s name—the name of my mom’s close friend’s oldest son, his name was Eric. This is most likely attributed to the fact that my mom had to leave me with her friend for two months as she had to go to South Korea. Also, there was the fact that my parents were never married to each other, but married other people within two years of my being born.

    I was passed back and forth, neither parent really having full custody of me, as they didn’t feel it was responsible to go to court over it. I was in the custody of my mother mostly, however. Having the thoughts of ‘I can’t wait, I’m going to be with my dad soon’ or ‘It doesn’t matter, I’ll be back with my mom in a few days’ might have added to my sense of interment, even with my parents. I would think, rather subconsciously, that it doesn’t matter what I do, I still have another set of parents to go to.

    Over time, that even translated over to friends as well. Family, friends, places of residences, they were all temporary, nothing ever stayed the same. So in eighth grade, after I had lost one of the most stable parts of my life, I felt lost. Not only did I not have that place of comfort to return home to, I didn’t have any friends, and my step-brother didn’t think of me as family. My already loose sense of attachment to other people shifted to my books.

    I don’t cry when people die in real life, but I’ll cry for a book character. I care for or miss real people when I’m away from them, however I’ll return to book over and over again just to re-familiarize my self with a loved character. For me everything is temporary, the only things that last are my books, because if I lose one of them, I can just get another one, or go to fanfiction. The person I would miss the most, I believe, would be Emma.

    Emma is the one person that took the time to see me in eighth grade. She became the stability that I lost after moving from Shambala Asharama, the small community far along Jackson Creek Road. Though even the reaction I would have to not seeing her anymore probably wouldn’t be as extreme as it was supposed to be.

    My question, after leaving Shambala, is no longer ‘if’ but ‘when. Thinking back I have to wonder if even 7796 West Columbine Lane was truly even a stable support for me, because it seemed that my life lost all sense of up and down after moving. Now I know, it was only temporary. Is anything truly permanent?

Author's Note

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