My mom makes me laugh more than anyone I've ever met. Sometimes when I look at my brother, it's like getting to look at my Dad one last time. People used to ask if my best friend and I were twins because we look so much alike. When I was little, I kept confusing my Aunts' names, so now I have an Aunt Trinket and an Aunt Bones instead of an Aunt Yvonne and an Aunt Bonnie. Sometimes when it was warm enough, my Mom and I would sit under the locust tree in our front yard and she would brush my hair. At night, after dinner, my Dad and I would go out into the garage and I would saw bolts in half while he worked on his truck. My brother explained earthquakes to me using Pokemon cards. Before he died, my Dad used to carry me on his shoulders and I was convinced that if I reached high enough, I could grab a cloud. In my lifetime, six different people have lived with my family and I from anywhere between two weeks and two years. In the summertime, when Momma decided it was too hot, she'd pile all of us in the car, get some fried chicken from the grocery store, and take us to the river to float. When I was in middle school, Jesus found me and changed everything that I thought that I knew. It was in a little white baptist church that I discovered that I was capable of great things.

In the bible, it talks about how God built us in the secret place, and my secret place was in all the memories of my family. My bones were formed in the love of my mother and father, my flesh was knit together in the places I've been and my spirit was forged in the memories that I made. I am composed of the people I love and the memories we created together. It took coming to college to make me feel this way about my hometown.

I grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Spokane. People always made jokes about Hillyard and the people there. When I got older, I understood how easy it was to make jokes from the outside, but living there, seeing the families that struggled, including my own, just made my heart hurt. I wanted to badly to get out, to go to school, get a degree and never look back. The last thing I wanted was to turn into one of those Hillyard kids who stayed in the neighborhood their whole lives and never amounted to much. I thought that going to school would mean that I could start over, and in a way it did. I got the chance to meet new people and experience new things, but there was always a part of me that felt like I didn't quite fit. Then I went home for the first time. I felt like everything had changed, the neighborhood just didn't feel the same anymore, but really the only thing that had changed was me. Coming to college had changed me, but it didn't change the place that I had come from.

I'm not ashamed of where I'm from anymore, but that isn't where I am going either. I am building myself a better life, but that doesn't mean that the place I came from was worth forgetting. It was the sort of place that you can build from, that you can create a better life from.