I found myself staring at the ugly, squared carpet that I can imagine had been there since the tiny, Muskegon airport first opened. I had been staring at them for so long I felt as though I was lost within the maze of lines. The shadows of the fan dissolved every other second, repeating over and over again. I could hear the monotone voices of my family talking about plans and events in the future that I honestly did not care about. Everyone was talking but at the same time, everyone was so quiet. I kept receiving grins from my indirect family, and I couldn’t tell if they were out of excitement or  to keep me calm. They would give my brother the same expression, but he was four so all he would do is smile back.
“How are you?” My Aunt Sarah asked me. I was eight years old and in less than two hours I would be on an airplane, so this is pretty exciting stuff. Why would I be anything other than excited?
“I’m good.”
Finally there was some laughter from someone. My uncle had broken the silence from the muted airport and it eased my nerves. I had been in an airport before and I was no stranger to flying. I was just used to returning a week or so later.
I still had cuts on my fingers from the tape dispenser and I remember finding three moving stickers in my bag from me removing them from my bed frame. Physically, I have moved once before. Mentally, I had never gone through the experience. It was annoying to not be able to play with my Barbies for weeks on end, after we packed them into a truck. Everything about my life was black and white and nailed into a routine.
“Alisen, come here and take a picture with all of us!” My mom called to me, with her hand extending. I thought that there was no point, because I would look the same the next time they saw me.
I realize now how important that picture was to my mom. She had no idea how long we were going to be living thousands of miles away in Florida, and she had wanted to capture as many memories as possible.
I have only seen my mom cry five times in my entire life. Most people are not wired to remember every second of their childhood, if they’re lucky they’ll have certain memories glued into the back of their minds forever. Seeing my mom cry into my grandma’s shoulder, in the middle of a tiny airport, is one of those memories.
I looked at her arms draped across her mother’s back, as her face reddened. There was no specific feeling that came over me when I was this. I didn’t know why she was crying. My eight year old self couldn’t tell if she was scared or nervous or if she was just going to miss my family. I had gotten nervous after a minute of staring down at the carpet again. The unfamiliarity of the lines led to the gate leading to the plane. Too many unsettling thoughts bubbled up to the front of my brain, and it wasn’t until then I realized how much my life was going to shy away from the black and white routine.
I was skeptical about Florida when we first arrived. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was exciting to see everything and watching the thermometer hit 100 degrees as we pulled up to our apartment, but it was unfamiliar. I was always the shy type of kid that would have most of my body hidden behind my mom’s while she talked to people that I didn’t know. So, I wasn’t comfortable with new things just appearing in my life without me wanting them there. 
The first eight months were the hardest out of the two years we lived there. We managed to get our four person family to fit in a two bedroom apartment. Most of the time it was just my mom, my brother, and myself. My dad traveled a lot, as he still does, so he was hardly ever there. My mom, for whatever reason, didn’t want my brother and I to attend public schools right off the bat, which lead her to homeschool us for a year. It was difficult, due to varying opinions on how school work should be handled and how much pressure was put on my mom to get so many things done with a smile on her face. I had just sassed my way through an argument with my mother about a dumb spelling list.
“I can not do this anymore, your father needs to come home!” My mom shouted, with tears balling up in her eyes. This was the second time I had witnessed her cry, and this time it was my fault.
I’m a brat. I hate the immense amount of change that my family has gone through in the past few months. The apartment we settled in wasn’t “home.” The house we rented wasn’t “home.” I was frustrated that she had referred to Florida as home.
Her and I sat on my tiny, twin bed and she pulled me into her chest for a hug and let out three exhausted breaths. I looked around my room, the gray walls washed out any color into a grayscale. The one window that was able to open, let in the sound of kids screaming and playing at the pool, along with a breeze that smelled like the saltwater swamps that were all around. My gaze moved up to my mom who breathed one last time before looking at me; she looked so desperate for help.
“Alisen, I know this is hard for you, believe me this is a battle for me too. Your father’s never home, and I need to take care of you and Jay the best way I can, no matter where we’re living. I need you to help me out so we can have a happy home again.” She had squeezed my hand several times while she talked to me.
I could only nod, because I was afraid if I talked that I would release the tears that had made their way to the brim of my eyes. She hugged me for a while after, and I swallowed my old ways and drained my eyes.
It took me a while to realize there was more to life than a black and white routine, to follow day by day. I had to learn to bite my tongue when I wanted to fight with my mom, in order to keep things around me in balance. Keeping the people around me happy, by accepting the changes handed to me, made my life easier to deal with. I was beginning to learn the concept of adaptation, slowly but surely. 
It wasn’t long until family migrated again into a house that we had rented, just for the time being. I was getting a hold on the whole moving thing. There were no tears, no butterflies in my stomach, and no hastle. My mom had enrolled my brother and myself for school, and I was nervous but I understood how much easier it would be on my mom. Everyone was a lot happier in this house, than we were in the apartment. My dad was home more often and there wasn’t as much yelling. I was able to fall asleep at night, not thinking about how much longer we were going to be living here or how long it was going to be until I saw the rest of my family.
I felt more at home at this house. I had more freedom compared to a year ago.  I caught myself calling the house, “home”, which frightened me at first. There were kids down the street that my brother and I soon befriended, which help a lot. The bottoms of my feet were permanently baked from the hot pavement I would walk on barefoot, and my skin had been a golden brown for months now. I didn’t seem like I had just moved here when I attended school, of course I was the “new girl”, but I didn’t act like it.
“Guys… We’re going home.” This is the first thing my dad said when he walked through the door. He threw his bag on the counter and walked across the linoleum floor to where my mom was standing, absolutely confused. “We’re getting transferred back Michigan for work. We can move back home!”
Everything after that happened so fast. It was the matter of three weeks after the announcement, that I was getting new cuts from tape dispensers and I had to pack up my Barbies again. I found out we were moving to Clarkston, Michigan. Clarkston was two hours away from our original location, but I couldn’t be more ecstatic even though I had no idea where I was going. There were no butterflies in my stomach when we arrived to the airport, at the beginning of June. I was clutching my bag with excitement, for this adventure. 
I was watching a girl pace nervously around, while her mom looked at her from the luggage caral. The mom looked stressed and exhausted.  I turned back to face my own mom, who was looking at the three boarding passes. There were no tears and she wasn’t picking at her nails, which she does when she’s nervous. It brought me back two years prior, watching her cry into my grandma’s arms, for a reason I still wasn’t sure of. She was calm and almost bored with the atmosphere of the airport. I looked down, watching my own reflection in the tiles. It was more comforting than the ugly carpeting of the Muskegon airport that was almost burned into my mind. There were no lines leading to a neverending maze, only a shiny reflection of myself. I wasn’t scared of where we were going, even if it wasn’t home. I did not know what it was going to involve and I wasn’t afraid of however much change was about to lie ahead. 
After the short-long journey I went through, living in St.Petersburg, Florida, I had experienced a lot of things. I encountered a larger group of different people with different stories that I never would’ve met in Michigan. People act differently even though they may only be a couple states south. I gained a new attitude towards change as well. Beforehand, I would hide behind legs to avoid meeting someone I wasn’t familiar with or stick my nose up to anything remotely new or out of routine. And after the experiences of seeing my mom cry because she needed me to set up to making new friends in an area I had just moved to, I couldn’t find anything worth hiding from.