I didn't always used to live here. Before I moved here we lived tucked away behind some trees and the sharp bend of a road. Connecticut is covered, covered in trees. The roads are ten inches wide and you can hardly see your neighbors. Behind the bend and the trees, in our salt-box house, I began the risky business of making memories.

I think about the house now, how it looked each season, the bright red door forever red. That house had wooden shingles on the roof that might fly off in a hurricane, and little holes in the very side from woodpeckers. I can't touch it anymore.

Back in the past, I went school for the first time in my life since kindergarden, and even that only lasted four days. I was homeschooled until I left home for a public fifth grade. It was charming. School in town, 1,000 other kids my age, snow all over my coat, salt crunching beneath my feet as I waited for the bus in the dead of winter. I loved it. I enjoyed the atmosphere of teachers and students. I still remember the pink 2-inch binder I used for all subjects, the bell ringing in my ears, a boy I hardly knew "asking me out" next to the violin lockers. What was he doing there? He didn't even play an instrument.

He occasionally drops me a note every once in awhile. I reply and we converse awhile and "reminisce". I feel the pang of the part of me I left there, in the past, and a shoot of envy begins to grow for an hour or two when I remember everything I had there. Of course, change is necessary. Still, I miss the snow crunching under my feet and the kids all around me, swimming in my head.

But it wasn't to be. I left on June 15th and never came back. I homeschooled again. I slowly made social progress, but until late winter, I felt an odd feeling. I felt like everybody I knew was being drawn with invisible ink in the same town, even street as me. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't see them. Even though we lived in the same town, my extraction from that world resulted in an accidental "isolation". I never saw many of them again. I was a little mousier, a little quieter, and a little more careful.

And there they are at Christmas this year, my elementary friends, requesting to follow me on Instagram behind a screen. Like I said, I never saw many of them again, ever. Those requests left me with a sweet recollection, but a bitter taste on my tongue,

But I was a quiet little mouse back then. Then the news of moving form Connecticut worked like a magic switch. I grew close to my homeschool class. We were an interesting bunch of forget-me-nots, we were. I found a best friend, older, taller, but still the best. I grew to be so easy with them, I forgot myself. Life was blissful in the spring. We listened to Ingrid Michaelson and Sara Barelleis, Girls and Boys and Kaleidoscope Heart. I switched on "Machine Gun" on the way to photography. I forgot my "old life", and school was a sweet breeze. Then it was May, and May sent us south.

Ingrid Michaelson and Sara Barelleis. Breaks my heart when they come on shuffle on my iPod 5. I can hardly bear it, foolish as it sounds. After all, I was so young.

Then we packed out boxes, and boxes, and boxes, and bags. I dreamed vaguely of saying goodbye to the eleven-year-olds from the school-yard, but I had to live saying goodbye to the forget-me-nots. My going-away parties, one from [my favorite,] my survival skills class, the other my dance class. Each consisted of bittersweet exchange, cake, and mixed feelings. Worst of all, I didn't see it coming. I didn't realize I loved them that much. It was, in my young life, one of the hardest things I had to do. And right after I had fallen into young love too, love left to die cold and alone six months in.

And now, we have all parted ways, grown up and learned about the galaxies. That world is what I like to call "The Underworld", for it is inability to be reached. Gone. Untouchable. My heart of glass, forgetting to feel, remembering to break, was forced  to move on with the wind in the east. So now I have to ask myself the question, "Don't you miss the Underworld?" It's like a taunt or something, a way to scare myself. But I just let my glass heart crack momentarily, then I turn away from the forget-me-nots, the schoolyard, and the many, many immixing feelings and turn on Girls and Boys to drown it out.