By the Playbook

By the Playbook (13)

I was born in Germany, in a small town that translates to Crosslines. The town might have been crossed, but that was simplest time in my life that I can remember.

I lived in a simple house with my older sister, Emily, and my parents. Next to us lived Rudy, the boy who would become my sister's best friend, and his mother Esther. His father had died in the war. Down the street was Jared, my cousin who acted more like a brother than anything else.

That's all I can remember of the people in Germany. Mom and Dad, Rudy and Esther, and Emily and Jared. Other than Old Man Franklin (I still don't know his name), they were all I knew and all I really cared about.

We lived there until I was four. My parents had a thing for travelling, claiming that the world was too big of a place to not explore, and so we moved to Spain within four months of notice. I don't remember much about it because we were only there for ten months, but I remember the only words I was able to say in Spanish at that time, which translate to "will you be my friend?"

Emily tells me that Mom and Dad were restless in Spain. We moved again ten months after we arrived, this time to England. Manchester, to be exact. That was when I started to be able to put the small amount of English I knew to use, and by the time Mom and Dad were content to settle for at least a short time. I had my first birthday party outside of Germany there, which consisted of a solid seven people - Emily, my parents, a girl named Stacey Higgins, the Eakins twins, and myself. That, I suppose, is a milestone in my life - it's a time where I was able to finally make friends.

Friends, however, are temporary when you live like I did. We moved to Ireland just over a year after we left England. Mom and Dad had been hinting at it for months, and so Emily (she has a knack for languages) used to give me little lessons in Irish after Mom and Dad assumed we'd went to bed. While some kids my age were staying up late playing with toys or writing in little diaries, I was learning my fourth language at the age of seven. At that point I was not fluent in any but German, and became known as the German girl (blonde hair, blue eyes, and a heavy accent. It was awful.).

People know I wouldn't be around long from the first day of school, when I had to tell them how I'd ended up in Ireland from Germany, and the ones who did decided that I was a snobby little rich kid that travelled all over the world. It took me a long time to be able to figure out how to say it was because my dad owned one of the biggest companies in the world.

Emily and I both hated Ireland as kids. I can remember hiding under my blankets as she screamed at them that she wanted to go home and fought with them for hours. It took a solid week and a half of her not speaking to anyone, including me, that my parents gave in. Six months after we moved to Ireland, we moved back home to Germany.

We spent a year at home with Rudy and Jared before my parents caught the travel itch again. We moved to Thailand, which I loved, but didn't bother to unpack our stuff. The year after that is a blur, the only solid thing I remember being Paris after a full year of living in a home for no more than two months at a time. We lived in Paris for a year, where I learned French, which turned out to be the easiest language I speak to learn. Afterwards, we moved back to Manchester for a year, and when I turned eleven, moved to California.

It took weeks of begging to be able to stay there. We moved into this beautiful house on an island, one that my great grandfather had bought for his wife, and I fell in love with it. By this point, I consider California my home more than Germany.

English is the hardest language I know. All of the stupid words that sound the same or look the same, it took me years to figure them out, but I learned quickly. I taught myself how to talk without an accent, something that I've mastered by this point and something that my sister and parents always hated ("you're multilingual, embrace it!") and decided that if I was going to be in a place for a short time, I was going to come in with a bang and leave with one too.