Stability

          “But I don’t want you to move.”  I can still remember the context in which I thought these words.  I was in computer class in tenth grade—one of my years in America.  In Japan, I was home schooled and had a grand total of about five friends my age, two of them Australian, two of them American, and one of them Japanese.  Here in America, though, I was in a Christian school.  There were forty-nine kids in the high school, and I considered myself friends with about forty of them.  I was the one who drifted in and out of their lives, four years in Japan, one year in America.  This was my family’s second furlough.

            My class in America was one of the most important parts of my life.  They were the first people I wanted to see again.  Within months of arriving in Japan, I wanted to see my class again—to bring them to Japan.  I had daydreams of my grandpa coming to visit and bringing my class with him.  My grandpa did visit once, but it was just him.

            The reason my class was so important was they were the one constant thing I could hold onto in America.  Yes, individuals came and left, but my class was always there, sending me letters and/or videos about once a year.  I didn’t know a single year where a person in my class didn’t write or email me.  I knew only two years where the class didn’t send me a stack of letters or a video from them.

            The girl who I didn’t want to move had been my friend since preschool.  Her family was indeed thinking of moving, but she had said something about moving to Colorado or Montana or something far away—not Wisconsin  (Her family only ended up moving to a new house in the area.).  I couldn’t imagine that happening.  She was one of the people who’d always been part of my class.

            I was the one always moving.  Things were always changing.  What did it matter to me if this one girl moved?  This was my last year of school in America.  Simply put:  something would change.  A part of me would be ripped from the comfortable halls of Union Grove Christian School and sent off to Colorado or Montana or somewhere.  I hated when that happened.  Even if you switched to public school, a part of me got torn off.  You were part of my class.  My class was my identity in America.  Oh, I would learn to adjust once I got back and met the new people, but until I got used to it, you were conspicuously missing from my life.  When I’d said “good-bye,” I’d thought it would mean “good-bye for now,” not “good-bye forever.”  I hate “good-bye forever.”

            Those paragraphs expand all the emotion I felt in a moment’s time in computer class.  It was only the time it took to send a shock through my body, and enough time for me to say something intelligent along the lines of, “No!” or “Why?”

            A sense of stability—that’s what my class was to me.  I could always go back to America and see those faces who I already knew and have a feeling, “Nothing has changed.”  My class was so good to me that even people who I’d never met before would come to me and say, “I’ve heard so much about you!”  I can tell you for a fact that my class did talk about previous members on occasion, and I sometimes wonder what stories they told about me when I was gone.  “Katrina Zemke.  Her parents are missionaries.  She lives in Japan.  She brings things called Pocky and dried squid to school.”  Who knows what else they said?  I always knew, though, that I would return to a place where I was loved.

            Nowadays, when I walk through the halls of UGCS, I rarely see the people I attended school with.  Still, though, the building echoes with haunts of happy memories—the memories that kept me going when I was six thousand miles from my friends.  Maybe I wouldn’t live in the same house as I had the last time, but I would always be going back to the same class.  A class where I always had a friend; a class where I was known; a class where I belonged.