Some things probably won't change.

When I was 5, I attended kindergarten in Palm Desert, California. At the end of the year,we packed up and drove across the southwest desert to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. We lived there long enough for me to get a half year of first grade. Then we moved back to St. Louis over Christmas break and lived with my grandparents for a bit of time and I jumped into the middle of second grade. We found a house and I started 3rd grade at a small Catholic school near the National Cemetery and for the only time in my life until college, I stayed at one school for 3 years. We moved houses during that 3 years but I stayed at the same school.

 Writing that paragraph above, I feel things that you can't read. But read this one.

 We moved after fifth grade and my first day of school in 6th grade I got dressed in a hotel bathroom but went home to the house where we lived for two years. Then we moved to Dallas for 8th grade and part of 9th, moving over Christmas break again to Georgia. We stayed there until the end of my 10th grade year and then drove across I-10 down to Houston. I graduated from high school in Houston and went to SLU and bought a house in South St. Louis 18 years ago and haven't left.

 At some point, it has to stop breaking me.

 But I don't know when that point is ever going to come.

 I require routine. It's not that I prefer it. I require it. Life must be predictable. I don't even like good surprises. I would be terrible at a surprise birthday party. After the initial entrance, I would never adjust my thinking and would probably totally shut down.

 I hate endings. I cling to things, like grade schools my kids attended, far longer than I ever should have.

 I am terrified of being alone. Of being left. Of being new. Of being invisible.

 I keep waiting for this to go away. But it isn't going to.

 My brain is that old pair of jeans that you keep patching together because you can't bear to part with them but you really shouldn't wear them in public anymore. I'm stuck wearing them. At least they're comfortable.

 There are broken things in the world and I'm coming to accept that my brain is one of them. It doesn't mean it doesn't work. It just means I have to work around it sometime. I have to remember that the clutch is tricky and the brakes are loose. It runs fast and hot.

 And that's just the way it is.