The Sleepless Moon

1. My new school

Why am I transferring to a new school? Well, my family moved here, to Seattle, where my father got to be a secretary in a firm which is a new part of the one he used to work in Washington. He gets a bigger wage here, not that in the previous firm he wasn't earning a lot of money. He was. But, actually, he accepted this job just because this is mom's favorite city and she always wanted to live in Seattle. She always wanted to visit it, and when they would she'd just be talking about how amazing it would be if they lived here, but they never got a chance since everything they earned and built in was in Washington and they wanted a secure future for their kid. I mean me.

When they were kids, they used to imagine how one day they were going to leave Serbia, and live in a beautiful big house in America.

Yeah, they are from Serbia, from a very small village close to Belgrade, the capital city of their native country. If you don't know where that is, that is a country in South Europe in the peninsula called Balkan. Back in the time of my parents when they were living there, a lot of kinky habits and traditions were popular, though in a couple of villages there are still those traditions that forbid you almost everything.

My dad and mom had to live, respecting many rules and not being able to be happy and free like teenagers nowadays are. Mom was promised at a very young age to marry a very old man, that would provide her family with money and protect them from the bills they got into. She was a quiet and innocent girl and she had no choice of speech. She was thought that if she disobeyed her parents then she was a bad educated, ungrateful and spoiled daughter.

Instead, she had to be sacrificing and help her family, by getting married to an old man whom she didn't even know. There came my dad, as a hero who rescued her. How that is a little bit foggy to me since mom hates talking about it and told dad not to mention it to anyone, so he avoids telling me about it, just the basic facts that he thinks I deserve to know about my own mom.

What I don't really have to mention since you obviously already connected the dots is that they escaped. When I asked dad why they had to flee in America and not stay in their native country, because I figured out that had to be really hard to live everything yours and just disappear, leaving your family and the place where you got born and grew up, he said that was the only way because their cousins were really powerful and they could find them anywhere in Serbia. So the only solution was to get out of Serbia and go somewhere where their families didn't have any access, nor acquaintances, so they can't ruin their lives and try to take mom from him.

They built this life they have now, they earned money, they bought a house, they found jobs and got citizenship and all that from nothing. Their hands built all of this, all I have now and with blood and sweat they earned the money we are living from now. Nothing made them separate. They sticked together all those years through all the thick and thin they had been, and their love isn't getting weaker day by day like someone else thinks it happens in marriage. No, actually I think that it's growing bigger if that is even possible. It's strong so much that I think nothing will ever tear them apart and I can just long for that kind of relationship.

They learned me to be proud of my heritage and to never hide that I'm from Serbia, that I'm Serbian. They learned me to fight in life and to know how to settle anywhere. To earn everything by myself, and never ask from others when I have two hands and I'm capable of working. Work is everything they say. It always pays off, no matter how hard it may seem to you, no matter how long you think you have been working, eventually it always pays off.

But, yeah, we are now in Seattle. A firm gave dad this really big house, which is actually bigger than one we had in Washington. But that is exactly what we need since mom is pregnant. I'm very excited to have a brother or a sister, even though I'm 17 now.