April 2007, I was two months shy of sixteen. We had four one-way tickets, Tokyo-Seattle.

We had found the house on Craigslist where it had been posted by mistake for just one day by the real estate company. My dad was hoping to get hired by Microsoft and I was hoping to go to art school, so we knew we wanted to live somewhere around Seattle, and Gig Harbor had low crime stats and nice scenery. We knew the house was old and needed some work, but it was big enough and right on the water so we could deal with the rest. The lower level was unfinished and the realtors deemed it “unlivable”, so we got a deal on rent.

When we arrived, there was plastic covering all the windows and the house obviously hadn’t been vacuumed or properly cleaned in a long time. Japanese school years run April-March, so my brother and I spent our long summer break helping my mom clean and and fix up the house while Dad looked for work. I didn’t have any friends yet, and when school finally started it didn’t do much to improve that. The majority of my classmates were crude and disrespectful, so I kept to myself and did my schoolwork. I was consistently at the top of my classes that first year simply because I did the assigned work and listened to the teachers. After a year at the high school, I decided I was done and switched to taking the rest of my credits at the community college where the students were actually there to learn. I started figuring out what was most important in my life and thereby began to improve its quality.

Dad never got the job with Microsoft, but I did get to go to art school on a scholarship for a summer. I met some of the dearest and most influential people in my life and was able to travel and live abroad for a while. I discovered that I now have no qualms about getting up and going somewhere when the opportunity presents itself because my home and my heart are carried within myself and are not tied to any geographic location.