I was born in Vandenberg, California and my dad was in the Air Force. He was transferred to Iraklion Air Force Base in Crete before I started kindergarten.

I loved Crete. The weather was mild, the food was amazing, and it wasn’t crowded. I miss it to this day. We lived there for almost three years before Dad was transferred to F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

When I was eight, we were set to move from Crete to Wyoming and had to ship all of our furniture across the world before we left. The Base Housing loaned us what everyone called “stick furniture” because it was that classic boring military-same-looking stuff that was cheaply made.

So right before we’re about to leave Greece we got to try out what a coffee table might be like if we decided to get one for the new house.

There was this TV movie about a guy who lived with an actual pack of wolves in the wild back in the 90s. I remember as we were watching it during the scene where he drinks a lot of tea to mark his territory around his camp, I leaned back too far the wrong way on the couch while my mom warned me I was going to fall, then I remember falling (because she was right) and hitting the back left part of my head on the corner of the stick furniture coffee table that I wasn’t used to being there. I remember seeing stars and thinking of cartoons getting hit on the head.

I had a huge goose egg.

I remember being glad that I normally sleep on my stomach when it came to bedtime. I didn’t have to fight all night trying to find a comfortable way to sleep.

Not long later, I was violently ill on the plane the entire time we flew from one side of the Atlantic to another. I puked all over the carpeted floor in the New York airport when we landed back in America.

Until writing this, I hadn’t connected me hitting my head with my increased nausea. I don’t recall ever feeling so sick on any other flight I’ve taken. The flight was so long and I was new to flying—there weren’t enough trips under my belt to be able to say to a degree of certainty that flying always made me nauseous. I was eight. Kids get sick on airplanes. I’m not even sure how soon our flight was after I hit my head—just that it happened after we shipped our own furniture overseas.

I don’t get sick on planes anymore. I don’t fly anymore. The last time I was on a plane, the entire ordeal of walking through a massive building with bright lighting, dealing with airport security, and waiting for my plane was flooding to such a degree that I never want to fly again.

Which is a bummer. I liked the plane ride part of travel. For a while there as a kid, I wanted to learn how to fly a plane. I even went to space camp two summers in a row because I liked doing the flight simulator exercises. I was good at the satellite docking program.