That was, Then.

Fellowship

My name is Natasha Slockovich, or, Tash as my friends would like to call me. Judging by the name, you may think I'm Indian, but I'm really not. I was born in Russia to two very different parents who honestly, I don't even know how they got together and had me, but I guess that's how love works right?

 My parents decided to move to the United States when I was about 2 years old since they thought it was a better country to run their business in, and so now, I'm Tash the Russian-American. It's been 16 years since we moved to Houston Texas, our permanent residence, and I think I've just about started to get used to the city. Even though we live in Houston, most of my young age I spent traveling with my parents all over the country wherever they went for their work: New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, you name it.

Yeah, it's pretty fun being able to move countries first, and then advance that up a little to move around that country as well, but the part where it gets hard is when that brings stops in your life and when that passes, your life stops.

Since we travelled all over the place, I was mostly never physically attending school. I was applied for the distance learning course. Not going to school meant that I had unsteady friendships, no 'real' friends or 'best-friends' if I may say so. I never really knew what friends were, I never really understood how people made friends. I saw my parents doing that on a daily basis, but never did I imagine myself being able to do the same even though I craved for it to happen to me someday. I was lucky enough that my parents knew english beforehand and taught me english as my primary language ever since the beginning, well, that really helped me out here. 

As time passed, as I grew older, I got lonelier. Time passed, I grew and there was no chance of me being able to miss more school in the crucial years. I stayed at home under my grandmother's watch while my parents travelled for their work. I was so used to being around them for such long periods of time that I never really understood how to function without their presence. At that point, I remember telling my grandmother about how bad I wanted a friend. 

She tried everything, she took me to the parks, the play centers, tried helping me make friends at school, but somehow the whole concept was very alien to me since my parents never had time to feed me with these luxe activities. I felt as though people from my class didn't want me around them, or rather they liked the passive me around them. I was heartbroken the first couple of times, but didn't dwell on it much since I had my number one companion besides me, my cat, Kimchi. 

I stoically remember, at the age of 7, I was playing with my cat when I heard the doorbell ring. I opened the door to find a tall pretty lady standing on my porch with a girl who looked exactly my age. This was a very awkward minute of silence between where I waited to call granny and the lady started to say something. As I stood there, there were a million questions going on in my mind: Who is she? Why is she here? Do I know her?