A five-hour plane ride. This is my sixth one this year. I can picture that first one so clearly now. All the hope and excitement, the anticipation for something new, it feels like a whole life has gone by in that one year. And now this is my last flight. The last flight home.
August 2003.
“I got accepted to the University of Hawaii!!!” I ran out of my room, the room that had been built just for me. Me: an 18 year-old girl who, for her entire life, has shared a bedroom with a sister, or even a brother. Now just a year into that room and I’d be flying across the ocean, to stay for…well, forever! “Mom! I got accepted!”
“Accepted where?” my mom asked, as she sifted through a month’s worth of bills, piled high like the coins Ebenezer Scrooge counts in the beginning of all “A Christmas Carol” movies.
“To Hawaii!!” I was so excited.
Now, Hawaii was the only college that would accept me outright, due to a slight oversight by my less-than-competent counselor in High school. You see, before I was pulled from my eleventh grade English class to be put in the “gifted students” class (some new thing they were trying out I guess) I managed to get a “D” in the “regular kid’s class”. Of course, upon speaking with my counselor I was told that there was no worry and I would graduate and go on to bigger and better things. She also told me that I didn’t need another science class, one I scrambled to get into last minute senior year when a more informed student told me I needed it to graduate, let alone to get into any college. I sat through a semester with a room full of ninth graders, not my idea of fun. Needless to say, when I got my first rejection letter from, of all places, CSUN I was not completely surprised to see the note that a “C” or better was required in that infamous eleventh grade “regular-kid” class. So this letter from Hawaii meant, not only do I get to move out, but I also don’t have to take an English class over the summer!
The first flight was all hope and excitement. I was glad to have my mom with me, for the support and to help me get settled in. I would be all alone soon enough, but I wasn’t thinking about that then.
December 2003.
My first flight home after four months in Hawaii was a small relief. Though I had made a couple of friends, I had never been the best at making new contacts. I’m not shy, no one would call me shy, but I’m awkward in new situations and it takes me some time to warm up to new people.
I was excited to be going home and seeing everyone I had left behind, but I was anxious to be going “home” to a new one. While I was away my family uprooted and moved out to Palmdale. Palmdale. I’d been there once before to pick up a friend, it seemed like it was a thousand miles away. It was cold and foreign, and no matter how many sweet accessories my mom added to my room, this little hole in the wall compared nothing to the gorgeous specially built room I had only just gotten just a year before.
I decided to go up to Oregon to visit my new roommate Ksenia, from Hawaii. I’d be seeing her again soon, but I no longer felt at home anywhere, I was a small branch floating in a vast ocean, never drifting close enough to a shore to make a home for myself.
The flight there was not very long, so hardly counted on my tally of flights that year. The tiny little twelve seater that took me from my stop in Seattle to Portland was the scariest flight I’d ever been on to date. But I made it there, and made it home alive, and only two hundred and fifty dollars worse for the wear.
January 2004
It was a little more emotional leaving again this time, my boyfriend went with us to the airport, I was sure I’d miss him more this time because I knew what it had been like the previous few months.
The next couple months were eventful, but looking back I hardly remember the events and adventures through my haze of depression. When people talk of “cabin fever” living on an island, they know what they are talking about. I was starting to feel so alone, away from my family I had been so eager to leave, away from my boyfriend.
April 2004
I had joined Model UN, to further my political science goals, and part of that class was going to be a trip to New York to visit the United Nations and have a true mock-UN meeting. Our school would be representing Italy.
I love New York, ever since I was a wee-one going there to visit my grandma. My mother was born and raised in New York, and when I was a little girl she said I even sounded like I had a New York accent. At that point I was still sure I would move there some day.
My sister had spring break during the time I would be in New York, so instead of taking a trip to Hawaii to visit me, she decided to make it a trip to New York so she could also visit her long-distance boyfriend who was going to NYU at the time.
Nine hour flight there and nine hour flight back, and at this moment I couldn’t tell you what the heck we did there.
July 2004
Here I am on a plane once again. Five hours to go and I’ll be home again in Palmdale. As I stare out the window and catch my last glimpse of the beautiful luscious island I can’t help but feel a pain for all my lost adventures. They have been lost in their time, trapped in a place I will hardly remember in a year. I wont be going back to the University of Hawaii. I will go to Antelope Valley and Pierce College, then massage school, COC and finally CSUN. A beautiful daughter, a marriage and a divorce later, Hawaii will be nothing but a distant past. But I know nothing of that now. Right now I just stare out the window and see the ocean take over, I close the shade and start watching the movie that’s playing.
“Pretzels and Ginger Ale please.”
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