Between Two Places

So, just imagine that your friend is going away, how would you take that? What if your parents were to go away and you wouldn’t see them for a couple of months, what would you do?
I was placed in this difficult position a couple months ago when my parents and I were on a car ride back home; they told me they had to go back to Uruguay because my grandmother was sick and needed to have surgery on her ears and her back. At that moment all I could think of was the life that I’ve been living here and if it could be the same in Uruguay.
Who am I going to pick up in the mornings on my way to school? How am I going to get coffee done the right way? Is there even going to be a Dunkin Donuts down there?
After all of the hours in school, am I going to need a job when I get there? All of these questions will be up in the air until the moment comes.
At this moment I was about two months short of graduating high school and did not want to know a thing about moving. Does this mean that I have to make new friends somewhere else?
That same night I went to my girlfriends house to tell her the bad news, she thought the best of it, and was nothing but supportive of the situation. I understood that I couldn’t be selfish because there are other relatives that need my parents too.
A couple of days after that my parents and I sat down for a talk, and all I could think was why are they doing this to me? It’s not fair to me; I’ve been waiting my whole life to get to college and now I have to go somewhere far and try to study? I didn’t say a word. All that my parents could tell me is that it does for my grandmother and her health and all that I had to do was go over for a couple of months and come back. It sounded easy but it was far from simple.
So I was told that I would have to live with my grandparents for two months until I could go to Uruguay with my parents. This meant that the house that we lived in was going up for sale, and by now I wanted to spend as much time as I could with my friends and family. The next couple of months were going to be hard on everyone since there was so much work to be done. Every single piece of paper work had to be filled out so my parents could leave the country with no problems. This meant that everyone had to make sacrifices to make everything go smoothly.
By the end of May everything went up for sale: the cars, the house, and the furniture. Just as my High School Career was coming to an end, so were my parent’s lives in the United States. On a Monday morning in mid-June I heard my dad’s footsteps leading up to my room. The clock just hit 6 a.m., my head was under the covers and I was not willing to get up. Just knowing that everything will be gone by mid-morning was a terrifying feeling.
Just as my mom got all of the paperwork together, my dad and his friends began loading the container. They asked me to help since some of the belongings were heavy. All of a sudden I had the chills as I grabbed a box that belonged to me, a feeling I can’t explain. The whole loading extravaganza took a couple of hours. By mid-morning the house was nearly empty, all that was left were the some blow up mattress and our clothes.
Later that day we made a trip to NYC. The trip consisted of my parents, my brothers, my girlfriend and I. The trip was to go and get all of the paperwork from the container ready so we didn’t have to go back later on and deal with it. Since none of the paperwork got done because of miscommunication, we decided to make a trip to Chinatown. The trip ended up being really fun since I had never been to Chinatown. It was an experience that I never had before. Bargaining with people was never my strong point, but I was told that they would take any money that you show them so it would be fine to bargain with them. When I came home it hit me, my parents were moving and I didn’t know what to do.
That Sunday I was to have breakfast with my parents for one last time until I would see them again in Uruguay. That following Monday was the day they would leave for Florida where they would take a plane that would take them to Uruguay. It’s been a week and a half since they left and we keep in touch and talk on the phone every day. Sometimes it’s hard on me, seeing as we were all close, but as my dad said, “it’s going to help you be more independent and be responsible with my possessions”. As I get home from work in the evenings now, I miss seeing my little brothers out in the yard running around, or at night when my little brother didn’t want to go to sleep and fought with my mom to let him stay up. It’s just one of the little things that get my emotions running.