I have lived here for all 14 of my years.

I've memorized these drab, green walls and I've memorized the grain in our hardwood floors. I know my neighbors sleeping habits and music tastes almost better than my own. I know the teachers that work at the school down the road, I know which door is which by the way it creaks and who is walking where by the stomping on the wood. I know which parts of my house were built in which area, I know every inch of this place.

It's the sense of familiarity, the fourteen years of the same thing, that makes it the most common place. The place I can draw with my eyes closed, the place where I can identify the rooms by smell alone.

It's the place of my childhood, the little girl with the patchy skin, the curly ginger hair that I grew out of. The fifteen cats. My home is the place of EZ-Bake Ovens and the place where I made my first pie lattice. It's where I made countless crafts and dyed cheap dollar-store eggs shades of vibrant blue, the place where I got stuck in the bamboo.

My home is the place where I watched my yellow nursery with the outdated white carpet that itched when you walked on it turn into the place with the blue walls and sand colored carpet that was really no better. It's the place where I sit at the dinner table that's twice my age, where I look at the tackiest painting of a cat to exist yet we keep up because the artist is from Russia.

My home is the place with slightly too many chairs and old decorations from parties that aren't our own.

I didn't like it.

It was the same, it was comfort, it was what I knew.

And then when it was taken from me, I realized how much home means to me.

I watched my blue walls trade for white ones and my worn down creaky door trade for a grotesque mint green one. I traded the terrible country music of my neighbors to the rhythmic beating of one hundred hearts, I traded the smell of incense for medicine and sadness.

I traded California warmth for the ice-age air conditioner, arm bands for identification bands, YouTube for a football team I had never heard of. I traded biology classes for ambulance rides and math for cardiology appointments.

I lost the steadiness in my hands, I lost my will to write, I started to draw pictures of the other people I saw who had traded too. I missed the smell of incense.

I'm only fourteen and I've had a disease for 4 years now. I've had SVT. They say they can get rid of it, just freeze off the bad part of my heart and send me back to the nightmare that is my home.

But now, home seems like a dream.

end.

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