For most of my life, home was never a place. It was moving boxes, new schools, and learning how to say goodbye, before I was ever ready. Then, for the first time, I found people who felt like family. A place where I didn't have to keep wondering when I'd have to leave next. It finally felt like home. Now college is here, and once again, I'm packing up my life to start over. It's exciting, but it's hard to leave the first place that ever made me feel like I truly belonged. Maybe being a...

I grew up between time zones, measuring years in PCS, learning that “home” could be a mailbox I learned to stop checking. I became fluent in starting over, new hallways, new faces, new versions of me introduced like I had always been there. Now I’m eighteen, standing at the edge of something louder than moving trucks, where goodbyes don’t come with return dates and I can’t follow behind anymore. They call it becoming an adult, but I still carry every place I left like stamps pressed into my...

I learned early that goodbye is a language spoken quietly in parking lots, in driveways full of cardboard boxes, in hallways where lockers close for the last time. Being a military kid means you grow up measuring life in school years and duty stations, friends who stay for two years, sometimes one, sometimes just long enough to learn their favorite song before they disappear on a new map. But this year feels different. Senior year sits heavy in my hands, like a suitcase that isn’t packed yet....