I woke up, it was harder to get up this time. The air mattress had halfway deflated in my sleep. I sat on the edge of it and put my feet on the cool tile, there was no carpet anymore. That had been packed up. Like the rest of my things. I looked at the bare beige wall. There were no posters, not even dust. Everything had been wiped down. It smelled like a hospital. I got up to get dressed. I didn’t have a closet full of clothes anymore. My life was packed into a suitcase.

My dad was born and raised in the Military, and so was I. As a child, I went to four different elementary schools, and that didn’t change as I got older. I went to two middle schools and two high schools. I always thought that home was where I was currently living. Some said it was where the heart is, or where your family is. Others said it was the place you liked most. I never had my answer to this question, like many ideas you have at a young age.

I didn’t have my answer to this question until I was in high school. Coming back to the United States after living in Taiwan for my first year. I got to see what it was like to live the “normal” American teen life. I got to drive around in a car with no adults, blasting whatever music I wanted. I went to drive-throughs at ridiculous hours of the night. I did almost whatever I wanted to.

One night, we met up with some of my cousin’ friends. Since I was from Taiwan, they wanted to know a little bit about it. “Hey, what’s it like living in Thailand?” I explained to them they were different countries. They asked, “Do you speak Chinese?”, “I do not” I replied. I talked about how my dad was in the military and I have lived all over the world.

That is when they asked the dreaded question: “Where are you from?” My default answer was just to say California because that is where I had lived the longest, so I replied “California.” In the most nonchalant way I could. The rest of the night was fine and I didn’t start thinking about it until I was laying in my bed that night. My mind started to wander. I started thinking about what that question meant to me. I did not know. All the people I had grown up with always had a simple easy answer to that, and so did my relatives. Why could I not find an answer to it? The more I thought about this question the more it confused me.

I realized that I didn’t have to have an answer to this question. The experiences and the places that I have lived made me who I am. I am not a person who has a summer home they go back to or a place they were raised. Sadly, I won’t get to live in one home my entire life, but I would never trade experiences for it. It has made me who I am, and I am not the only one who has these experiences either. Growing up never living somewhere for more than three years, I have got to meet people with similar backgrounds. I wasn’t the only one who had ever experienced this. I realized that most of my close friends had this experience too.

This has taught me one main thing. I do not need to force myself to be from one place, and I did not have to call somewhere home. Maybe I didn’t have a place to say where I am from right now. Maybe it is something that is coming, and I am okay with that.

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