moving – Muddled Soma

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

There Is a Light That Never Goes Out – Day 36

January 30, 2026January 31, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A friend who helped you see yourself more clearly.

Lots of firsts happen in high school. Some turn into great stories, while others stay quiet and make a person better without fanfare at all. Carol was one of those quiet firsts for me. She was a minor character in my storyline, but she helped me see myself more clearly and understand that I was a process inside a process.

We found each other in Ms. Peregrine’s art class, and then we kept finding each other outside of it. We went to coffee shops and talked the way early 90s kids talked when we thought the world might be ending and might also be remade in the same week. Our conversations had that grunge, almost avant garde seriousness that made everything feel both ridiculous and sacred. Music was always part of it because music was how we translated ourselves back then. The Smiths, The Psychedelic Furs, Nirvana, it all gave us language when we did not have enough of our own.

Carol drove an old Saab, and we would head out to Derry, New Hampshire, to a small coffee shop where time slowed down. For a while, life really did seem simple: coffee, cigarettes in the cold air outside, art talk, future talk, and the illusion that we could choose our next chapter without the past reaching up to claim us.

Right before graduation, we went for coffee the way we usually did, and I told her about the next move, the one that was supposed to mean freedom. College. It was another fresh start with another address, but this one would be mine. It was still another version of me being packed up and carried forward, but it was going to be away from them. Carol listened, then reached down and handed me a gift. It was a vase she had made.

It still sits in my house. Like me, it is not smooth. It is textured, marked by the touch of others, and it does not pretend to be untouched. Its surface is made of rings, each one visible, each one earned. I can see where the clay was pressed thinner, where it was pulled upward, where it almost failed and did not. The shape narrows, widens, and narrows again, and nothing about it feels accidental. It looks like a thing that has been worked. It looks like a thing that has been tested. It looks honest.

When Carol handed it to me, she did not talk about the beauty of the object. She talked about the process. She told me that each move, each experience, each hurt, each whatever, reduces us. The wheel pulls the clay down even as it spins it forward. Loss compresses and change thins because living costs something. But then, she said, another hand builds us back up. Another layer with another pass, and another choice. She spoke like she was offering a map, and I remember realizing she was not just talking about clay. She was talking about me, and she was doing it in a way that did not feel like pity. It felt like recognition.

What stays with me is the part that sounded almost too simple to be true. The height is not predetermined. The clay does not decide that. The wheel does not decide that. The hands do. I do.

That sentence landed in a place in me that had always assumed the opposite. I had lived as if the moves and endings and misunderstandings were the authors, as if the next chapter was always something that happened to me rather than something I shaped. I had learned how to adapt, how to read rooms, how to disappear when necessary, and how to be grateful for whatever remained. I had not learned how to claim the idea that I could still choose. Not in the shiny motivational way, but in the real way, the slow way, the hands on the wheel way.

Experience is experience. It is not good or bad in the clean moral categories people love to use to make life feel organized. It is formative. It shapes. The vase does not judge the pressure that made it narrower. It holds it. It carries it forward. The narrow places make the wider ones possible. The evidence of strain becomes part of the strength, not an argument against it.

Carol helped me see myself more clearly. She gave me an image that could hold complexity without turning it into judgment. She handed me a physical reminder that being shaped is not the same thing as being broken.

The vase sits there, quiet and unimpressed, holding its own history without apology. It reminds me that I can honor what shaped me without letting it name my limits. The clay remembers everything. And still, it holds.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Detours and Dead Letters – Day 34

January 28, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – How the Friendship Changed

This is part three of a three prompt series. The first post is here and the second post is here.

Jeremy and I did not explode. There was no betrayal, no raised voices, no dramatic final scene with the kind of closure often found in movies with an amazing music and video montage. The friendship changed the way military friendships usually change. One day, the routine is intact. The next day, a family is loading boxes, a moving truck is idling, and the neighborhood has a new vacancy. One day we were hanging out during recess. The next day, he was going back to Texas.

In my mind, it felt like leaving. For Jeremy, it was a homecoming. He acted like the universe was correcting a mistake. He was a Texan through and through. He loved the heat and was ready to say goodbye to the winters. Alaska was, at best, an interruption for him…a detour. Texas was a return. I understood that much, even at that age. Still, understanding did not make his leaving hurt less.

We both said the things kids say when adults are listening. We promised to keep in touch. We said we would write. We said we would call when we could. And of course, we said we would not forget. Those sentiments were offered like bandages, thin and polite, as if language could seal up the gaping wound not even fully realized yet.

I upheld my part of the promise, writing him every week. Jeremy did not. I remember the ritual of writing him more than what I wrote him. I used the same pad of paper every time. I tried to make our ordinary days sound interesting, worth staying connected to. I narrated the small things because small things were what connected us. I wrote about a new snow fort, “our” new teacher, and the new kid who moved into his old house. I folded the letter carefully, far too small, slid it into the envelope, wrote his address, and then I waited.

He never responded. Not one time. At first, I worked hard to excuse his silence. I invented reasons for the friendship to remain intact, even if only on my side of the map. Maybe the mail got lost. Maybe his mother forgot to buy stamps. Maybe he wrote back and it disappeared into some military black hole where all the missing things go. I was loyal, and I was young enough to believe that if I kept showing up, the world would meet me halfway.

Then, slowly, I realized a letter was not coming. I was writing to myself. I was crushed for a long time, and I never talked about it. It did not look like grief adults would recognize. It looked like me becoming even more careful and small.

I did not make another best friend until two moves later, at Plattsburgh Air Force Base. Between Jeremy and Plattsburgh, I learned a lesson that felt less like wisdom and more like a bruise that never healed.

People say they will write. People say they will call. People say whatever they need to say in the last hour before goodbye because the truth is too sharp to hold in your mouth. When people are not close to one another anymore, even if they once were, shit changes. Distance does not just stretch a friendship. It edits it. It removes the ordinary moments that keep love warm and alive. It replaces them with intention, and intention is harder to sustain than people admit because it requires work.

Looking back, I can see something tender under the damage. I kept writing because connection mattered to me. I believed in continuity, even when my life trained me in detours. That belief did not save the friendship, but it revealed something about me. I was the kind of kid who tried to build a bridge. I was the kind of kid who stayed, even when someone else did not.

And maybe that is the quiet hope inside the story. The friendship changed, and it hurt. It left a mark. But it also showed me, early, that I was capable of devotion, of showing up, of loving in a way that was not performative. The loss taught me caution, yes. But the writing taught me something else too. It taught me that my instinct, even then, was to reach out, to connect, to make meaning, so I could stay human in a life designed around leaving.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Adventures in Moving: ALCAN Edition – Day 15

January 9, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A family story that shaped how you saw yourself.

Family stories are told around the table to remind us who we have been and how we survived becoming who we are. They keep history alive, not in textbooks or archives, but in voices that know where to pause and when to laugh. Sometimes these stories shape how we see ourselves. Other times, they simply allow us to recognize ourselves inside someone else’s memory, and how we are seen outside of ourselves. In that recognition, connection happens. Not because our lives matched, but because the feeling did, or at least should have?

These stories carry more than nostalgia. They show us how anger was handled, how grief was avoided or honored, how love showed up…or did not show up. Long before anything happens to us, we have already been taught, quietly, how we are supposed to respond by who speaks, who stays silent, who fixes things, and who leaves the table early.

Family stories teach us what is celebrated and what is buried. They reveal which parts of the truth are told with ease and which ones are edited for comfort. Over time, I realized that I did not just inherit eye color or mannerisms. I inherited scripts. Expectations. Reflexes. The way a future moment might unfold has often already been practiced in the retelling of the past. Listening closely gives me a choice. I can honor the story without repeating it exactly. I can keep the memory alive while deciding how the next chapter sounds when my voice enters the room.

This story was told repeatedly in my family and has offered me wise counsel for my future self. My family was moving from March Air Force Base in Los Angeles, California to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska. Of course, we drove. Military families often drive because it is cheaper, longer, and character building in all the wrong ways – Adventures in Moving™. The highway that connects the lower forty-eight states to Alaska is the ALCAN Highway. It was still unfinished even in the early 1980’s. Smooth pavement would suddenly disappear into gravel, potholes, and dust. Civilization vanished for long stretches. It was a road that demanded endurance and offered very little grace in return.

Somewhere in Canada, we stopped at a small diner. The kind with thin walls, vinyl booths, and a quiet that made every sound matter. We sat down, ordered drinks, and tried not to look like exactly what we were: a tired military family passing through a place that was not ours. My father got up to use the bathroom.

What happened next became legend.

The bathroom walls betrayed him, loudly and repeatedly. The sounds were unmistakable and entirely public. They echoed through the thin walls and into the dining room. Every person in that restaurant knew exactly what was happening. There was no hiding it. No dignity left to salvage.

My mother did not laugh. She did not smile. She did not lean into the absurdity of it. She stood up, gathered us, and marched us out of the diner in silence. We waited outside by the car, humiliated and rigid, while my father finished what should have been a private moment. When he came out and realized we had left, there was no humor. No apology. No acknowledgment of how ridiculous or human the moment was. There was only anger and tension.

This is the part that has stayed with me over the years. No one softened the moment. No one repaired it. No one said I am sorry or this is funny or we will laugh about this later. It was a shared experience that somehow belonged to no one and taught nothing except how not to be together. That story shaped me because it taught me what I wanted instead of that.

I wanted someone to laugh with. I wanted someone who could sit in discomfort and still choose kindness. I wanted apologies to exist, even for small things. I wanted mistakes to be survivable. I wanted love that could handle embarrassment without turning it into punishment. I wanted partnership!

Life is not fully paved. It shifts without warning. Smooth moments give way to rough stretches. What matters is not the road itself, but who you ride with and how you treat each other when the pavement disappears. That diner taught me that silence can wound more deeply than noise. And it taught me, very early, the kind of person I hoped to become when the road got rough.

Tag: moving