Logan G...
Yokota Middle School
In March, 2020, my dad had received orders to go on a short tour to Korea, meaning that he would spend a year in South Korea, leaving us back in the States.
At the kitchen where he shared this information with my family, I remember asking, “Why?”
“After my year in Korea is up, we all will move to Japan, finally living overseas, like me and your mother had been wanting for a long time.” He replied. And so, he left in early March, leaving us at Dyess Air Force Base. To make things worse, around a week after he left, Covid hit hard. I was now in virtual school. Around that time, my mom had decided that she wanted to live in Georgia, as to have the comfort of family. After all, she was a mother of 3, a 3 year old, 5 year old and 10 year old.
Once we arrived at Moody, the base in Georgia where we were going to live at, I was enrolled in virtual school. Although we lived very close to my grandmother, nothing was very much better. My life was a bleak wasteland, and the fact that my dad was not in Georgia with us was almost too much to handle. My family had never done anything like this before, and as I told my dad in a video chat once, it was like a hole through the entire family. Around Christmastime, my school released an assignment where you had to write about what you wanted the most for Christmas. It didn’t take much thinking to figure out what I should write. I began to explain that all I wanted for Christmas was my dad returning from his short tour.
On Christmas Eve, my family went to my grandmother's house. After our dinner we relaxed in the living room until my grandmother called me out into the kitchen. I was very confused. I thought maybe I was to help with the cleanup of dinner, like cleaning the table, or worse, doing dishes. As I walked in however, I saw something that I legitimately couldn’t believe. I saw my dad standing in the doorway. As I walked towards him, I quite literally believed I would just run into a wall, but as I hugged him, I realized that he was real. He was here, in Georgia. After I sat down on the couch in shock, he explained that he was able to go to Georgia for Christmas, and that he would have to return in about a week.
After Christmas, I was okay with him leaving again. I knew that he would return in about 3 months, and then, since it was my 11th birthday, we would go to the Wizarding World at Universal before going to Japan. As I waved goodbye as he drove away from our house, back to the airport, I knew that he would be back soon, and that once he returned, I would be happy once again.