So this is for an question. I just made a new Fanfic account just for this so... yeah... Here it is. Non-fiction goodness.
I read the letter and my world starts to spin around me to the point that I can't think, can't move, can't breathe. I don't quite know what's going on or where we're going to go or whether I'm going to school the next day. I think I grab a hold on my grandma as she reads out loud the words that start it all. I try to remember how to breathe. I make my way out the room, my nine year old mind reeling.
The door to our room, me and my siblings, is closed and I enter the messy room with books thrown around and clothes on the floor. I'm alone, since we barely used our room preferring to drop wherever we landed on- in a bed or not. Our room is the same it looked the day before and the day before that and I'm almost grateful that it is. I won't be in this room ever again after that week. I won't do laundry in the overheated laundry room next to the swimming pool, won't eat dinner in that dirty kitchen that always smells like cinnamon because my grandma forgot to put the top on the blender while making applesauce that one day after school. I won't sit by the pool on a hot day or do homework on the overcrowded porch. I won't be there anymore. I pick up a sweatshirt and drag it out from under whatever was sitting on it. It smells dirty but I put it on anyways, waiting for my mother to get home. My dad and grandma are sitting in the living room talking loudly, my other siblings playing outside with each other and no one else. We weren't well liked as we were the only white kids in the complex.
There doesn't seem to be any gravity in our house. The items all are floating it seems, misplaced. My mother taught me this trick: If you repeat something over and over again it loses its meaning. So when dad walks in and see's me there before saying sorry to me over and over again as he held me tears almost flowing but not quiet, I think at the end of the day it's lost it meaning. But I needed him then and I needed my mother and my older sister and younger siblings too. To tell me it's going to be okay. That the words on that page don't mean what I think they do.
When mom gets home she wraps her arms around my dad and stares at the letter. They sit there for hours before she leaves again.
My grandma doesn't say that much for that entire week, but then again nobody really says anything anymore. The entire week is bittersweet Christmas in a little under a month, the presents already opened and doled out and then packed in boxes. I'd never seen so many boxes in my life.
I remember the day we left the most though, as my siblings fell asleep before midnight and the boxes and such they carried left for someone else to pick up and move. I'm only a year younger than my older sister and only two years older than my brother but I stayed up the entire night and went to school the next day. I packed up boxes and carted them outside with a family friend who loaded it into a truck. I laughed because it's hard not to when you're pushed on a dolly cart by a 6 foot man/child who pushes you fast through the hallways, voices echoing, waking up people you'll never see again.
The first homeless shelter we lived in smelled awful and I stayed awake for as long as I could as my grandma stood watch in a chair, worried someone would do something to us while we slept. I'm only a year younger than my sister yet the adults there treated me a million years younger than my nine years. They took advantage of my age and put me last in line to use the bathrooms at 4 o'clock in the morning before the shelter sent us out in the world, I didn't take a shower that day because too many people were ahead of me and my sisters and no matter how many times we asked they said no. We almost didn't go to school.
But that was after we lived in our car for a night, seven people in such a small place, windows cracked ever so slightly and the smell of food lingering in the air from dinner that we ate from fast food bags, I think it might have been McDonalds.
We were snuck in to a hotel for the first time in three years, though the last hotel we lived in knew we were all there. There was a pool but the hotel manager thought there was only three people living in the room so we had to sneak around a bit but we managed to enjoy it for awhile. After we moved in there for a little while my dad dragged me to the bathroom and hugged me saying thank you. He thanked me for helping move everything and for not complaining too much though he knew I wanted to so bad. But I guess that's my curse. Trusting things will turn out better than they are. I'm nice to people who "don't deserve kindness" and I laugh too hard on jokes that aren't funny.
But life moved on and though we moved from that one hotel to a motel room. My older sister would help with us with our math homework, I'd help with English work and artwork, and my brother helped us with our science and played with toys with my youngest sister. I suppose you can say that we've never had any stability- that my family's screwed up. I'm inclined to believe you because ever since we've moved to that motel we've moved every month for the last six years.
But its life in the big city, you either sink or swim. And we just keep trying to keep our heads above water, our arms tired from the days full of swimming with no land in sight. But we do. And after every move when we get at each other's throats for keeping old toys or papers that make a load we push in a hand cart so heavy, the day drawn out. We re-assemble our lives every three weeks and pack them away in bags and boxes and we repeat. Some people count their year in months- we count them in three week increments that sometimes are on a Monday, sometimes on a Sunday, almost always on a Wednesday. But we just keep going. It's our curse. And I don't want pity or your admiration, I just want to be able to give my siblings everything that they deserve because my siblings are great kids, and they deserve better. They really do.