For those of you that don't know I was born on July 14 1986 at 10:18 am in Augusta, Georgia.  I lived in a small town if you would like to call it that called Couchton, which i think was in South Carolina on the border with Georgia or in Georgia.  Anyway, my baby sitters were two sisters named Angie and Jennie who lived in a trailer next to us.  We had an inground pool and bamboo forest in our back yard.  I remember sometimes Angie and Jennie would be at our house and to backstrokes across the pool and teach us how to swim with our little floaties.  In 1990, my parents got divorced b/c of money and my mom moved to Aiken and my dad moved to Graniteville.  My brother and I lived with our mom on the weekdays and went across town to be with our dad on the weekends.  Our mom moved about six times within the county of Aiken within our first four years of school.  At the end of fourth grade my mom decided to move to Virginia with her girlfriend of the time..Tracy.  Tracy had lived in Atlanta for a few years and had lived with my mom for a year or two in Aiken.  Tracy was one of those traveling nurses and she loved her money.  If she found something disatisfying about a place she didn't go there.  She was very particular of how she spent money and how everything was done.  They moved to Virginia on a Thursday in 1996.  After that I began living with my dad in the quaint town of Graniteville.  It was a mill town..the first textile of the south was built there and is still running.  We went to the same elementary school we did during kindegarten and part of first grade.  We were basically living on our own at that point.  Our dad every day after work was at a local bar with our grandfather and we would be outside playing in the old crumbling house next door.  We played at our grandfather's house in the add on to the trailer or out in the huge driveway that was nothing but sugar-sand.  Or we went halfway up the driveway, (about 1 1/2 football fields length), and we would join our cousin in some imagination games.  If our dad was in a particular good mood that day and it wasn't cold we would go down to one of the three ponds located on the family property.  That was fun b/c they had a huge platform in the middle that we would dive off of into the deep part.  It was a man made pond but we didn't care...as long as we stayed away from the stumps left in the ground.  During the summer my brother and I would go to virginia to stay with our mom for a while.  One summer the summer after my mom had left we were in our mom's apartment and we got a phone call from our dad.  After a few girlfriends that my dad had he had finally found one that he liked enough to marry and he decided to do just that.  When we got back down to South Carolina we found out exactly what she was.  She wasn't a woman but a strict thing.  She made us clean and do stuff we hadn't ever done before...while she sat on the couch with our dad and watched tv most of the time.  When they got there new trailer with two acres of land we were happy.  But then we found out how much work it takes to keep that lawn clean cut and how much pine trees actually shed.  We vacuumed mostly everyday and we hardly ever got to go over to our friend Brian's house.  We were basically allowed to go to school and do housework and do our homework and eat and sleep and play silly imagination games with each other in the backyard.  When our mom finally got a house in virginia we were so looking forward to it.  Mind you this is now in 2001 and we have had to put up with asking for everything, even a glass of kool-aid, and now we were our own person.  It took us a while to get used to it and frankly I don't think I ever will stop asking if I can get something to drink or eat the last piece of chicken.  We met friends up here that we never thought we would have.  I met Sandra and Alla and Sarah and Erin and so many others that have influenced me so directly.  It's nice to be able to see all the friends that I have impacted personally and realize how exactly each one has impacted me.  That's been my life until very recently.  I have moved away from home.  I have become independent and wish I wasn't.  I've moved away from comfort and every one of my friends that I cared about so much like Sandra and Sarah and Alla that I just don't feel like I should be here.  I want this degree and at the same time I just want to be young and I just want to be home where I don't have to think about when my next bill is due.  I want to be free. I want to be with that one that I have found that loves me.  I want to be with the one I miss the most.  I want to be with Sandra.