home

when i was in the burg, i made a discovery.

long ago, before i even decided to move away, i had boxed up all of my artwork and random creations from birth until high school. i’d put them in this large cardboard box, labeled it ‘kelsey’s art and etc’ and put it out in the granary, where it has sat ever since. when i was home, i was going through some other boxes of my stuff in the granary, and happened upon this box. and i opened it.

it was fascinating.

i found the notebooks my friend alicia and i kept. alicia is my second cousin, is 350 days older than me and during middle and high school we were inseparable. infact, we called ourselves disjoined siamese twins. for a while, we were disjoined siamese triplets because we found a way to put a basketball in a hoodie and suspend it between the two of us.

when i was in 8th grade, the cool thing was to have a notebook with your best friends. you would write a note in it, and give it to your friend during passing period, and then she’d do the same. we have 2 notebooks and literally hundreds of pages of correspondence. it is so crazy to read what you wrote when you were 14.

but you want to know what was the strangest thing? we put this questionnaire thing in there, which we both answered. and one of the questions was ‘future residence’. and you know what i wrote? hawaii.

someone please tell me how i knew as a 14 year old that in 6 years i’d move to the other side of the country. how did i know even then that this place would become my home?

i remember when i was in china i’d see my friends’ pictures and they’d email me and tell me about life and i remember missing being here so bad it hurt. and i’d never had that feeling before. i was familiar with the longing to go, but never the longing to come back.

and it’s not just that there’s beautiful beaches everywhere and lush tropical foliage and jamba juice every 10 feet and long hawaiian words for street names (although i love all of these things). it’s that there are people here with whom i feel totally and completely at home. there’s a lot to it, many reasons why, many rants i have, and i’m going to spare you. but suffice to say, i have found people in a place where it feels like home.

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and if you feel like supporting the cause, send up a prayer that the job i really want will work out. because living in paradise is not cheap.