It's weird, because for most of my life, I've been the girl who moves. If I wanted to play an April Fool's joke, I would tell people we were moving somewhere exotic - and it would be close enough to the truth that they might believe it. When I was in first grade and moved to North Carolina for the first time, my friends thought the whole state was one big beach, and (let me tell you) it was quite a disappointment to discover they had been incorrect.
I wrote college essays about moving. It is central to who I am as a person not to stay in one place for too long. It is the reason my family is so close, and the reason I so value exploring my home, wherever it may be - I know it's not permanent.
What I'm trying to say is, I've loved almost every minute. There were certainly some teary goodbyes, a long string of letters and emails to far away places (those still happen), and some scary first days of school thrown in there, but seldom was it ever something I resented. I thought it was normal. I remember scoffing at the kids who called moving from Jamestown to Greensboro or even from South Carolina to North Carolina a move: what were they thinking? That's not even 200 miles! Easily a day trip to visit.
I remember thinking it was normal to rearrange your life, and, honestly, I still do. Packing up my dorm room last week, I realized that the smell after all was said and done felt like coming home, even when I was still in Chapel Hill. Suddenly, it hit me: it was the boxes. The smell of boxes reminded me of sitting on the floor, watching movers pack up in winters, springs and summer 2009, and then again in summer 2014. It reminded me of the feeling of leaving your house behind, the feeling of knowing everything was changing. It reminded me of knowing your support system would be there every time you came back, it reminded me of exciting new adventures, it reminded me of the way a house looks after it's empty and all that's left to fill it are the memories. It reminded me of nostalgia. Just tremendous nostalgia.
The biggest lesson I have learned from being "the girl that moves" is that I'm also the girl that stays. Every time we've moved, I've kept a couple of friends, a couple of words, a couple of traditions, a couple of favorites. My brother and I have become not people from any one place, but people from the world. When someone asks where we're from, we can say "It's complicated" and explain, but we can also just say wherever it is we're living at that time. The different aspects of ourselves that we've picked up along the way are just a happy surprise. We get to be the people who stayed, even when we're the boy and girl who moved.
