On Sturdy Legs

Into Boxes

Any bureaucracy involves a fair amount of red tape, and as an American who has lived on a military base most of my life, I got quite enough of it. More than enough. And considering how violently Allison was cooking in the kitchen, it was obvious how much more I was getting.

Allison was my dad's girlfriend--not quite fiancé since he never quite got around to the proposal but, in terms of commitment, they were already married. Allison raised me after my

mom took off when I was little; I called her mom until I realized that it wasn't true and even after, I have no qualms about letting a few "moms" slip out now and then. The red tape lay in the fact that Allison never legally adopted me; no one ever thought that it would be necessary, for my dad was in the army and quite intent on making a career out of it. He had completed several tours overseas and when he was gone, Allison looked after me until he came back and stepped into his Dad boots again. The army didn't care who looked after me while he was gone, as long as there was someone and their soldier was free to serve his country.

Chances had it that no one would continue to care who looked after me until I turned 18 and got on with my own life; however, we made the mistake of catching the attention of social services. Two weeks ago, I was with dad driving home from the annual Fort Hood party. He heard something on the radio that triggered a flashback from combat. I tried to get the wheel away from him to keep the car from swerving into the other lane, but dad forgot that I was his daughter and shoved me away from it. I did manage to pull the emergency brake but it was at the same time dad swerved to one side; the car flipped and rolled into a ditch.

I woke up in the hospital on base with a concussion only to be told that an incident report had to be filed and the court mandated that dad go in for residential treatment for the PTSD; my existence was not overlooked, and social services threw something of a fit that Allison was raising me in my dad's absence. She had spent the week getting mouthy in courtrooms to talk herself out of kidnapping charges.

Her big mouth had not managed to keep me in her custody, instead my social worker had so enthusiastically tracked down my real mom somewhere in the midwest where she apparently had a family of her own to replace the one she left. Since I was the degenerate that I had no excuse to be, I had put off packing as long as possible. Despite finding out that I would be flying up to my mom on Friday of this week, I had only started doing the real packing Thursday morning. Allison had more compliance with social services and went ahead to ship my dresser, desk, and bed to my mom. The result was a fair amount of chaos around my room. I had boxes across the floor--all with neat labels, thanks to Allison. The one labeled Clothes was currently empty on top of the pile of clothing that I had to take out of the dresser before it was shipped. My Decorations box was slightly more filled since I had been taking more of an incentive on that, even as hard as it was.

I had to drag one of the kitchen chairs across my room and hobble with it since my knee was still stuck in the brace that came with what happened when one tore up every single ligament in it. I made all those other runners who just tear their ACL look good. I braced one hand on the back of the chair and the other on my wall in case my knee decided to be unsteady beneath me as I climbed onto the chair and held on tight as my head spun. And there was that: in the process of rolling down a hill in a car, I had inevitably hit my head hard enough to leave me with one hell of a concussion and quite the bruise across my temple. The sooner my head healed, the better. Getting dizzy whenever I decided to move was getting old. Once spots weren't obscuring my vision, I stood on my tip toes to feel for the strip on the top right corner of the poster as not to damage it. Once I found the tab, I pulled to release the adhesive. Due to the number of posters I ended up with from the marathons I ran, Allison had insisted on putting them up with sticky strips that wouldn't damage the wall or poster. I never thought that I would be thanking her for that. I pulled the tabs on the other four corners and carefully took my poster for the last year's Texas Marathon down.