WHEN LIFE CHANGED IT'S MIND

CHAPTER 1: THE LIFE I THOUGHT WOULD LAST

I used to think families were permanent.

Not just the people in them, but the way they

made you feel.

Safe.

Protected.

Certain.

When I was little, I never understood why

adults worried so much about money. I knew

money was something my parents used to

buy things, but I never understood what it

meant to not have enough of it.

As far as I knew, things were always there.

If I needed a new pair of shoes for school,

somehow my father would find the money. If

school asked for something, my mother

would remind me not to forget it. If I came

home hungry, there was food.

It wasn't a perfect life.

But it was ours.

My father was the one who provided for us.

He worked hard, and I knew that because

sometimes I would watch him leave home

early in the morning while the rest of us were

still waking up.

I never asked where exactly he was going.

Children don't usually ask questions about

the things that make their lives comfortable.

They simply accept them.

My mother stayed at home. She was the kind

of mother who seemed to know where

everything was. She knew which child had

lost a book, who had eaten the last piece of

something, who needed to wake up for

school, and who was pretending to be asleep.

Our home was noisy.

There was always someone talking.

Someone laughing.

Someone complaining.

Sometimes there were arguments over things

that seemed extremely important at the time

and completely ridiculous years later.

I loved it.

I loved coming home from school and

knowing someone would be there

I loved knowing that if something scared me, I

could run to my parents.

I loved believing that tomorrow would look

almost exactly like today.

I had no reason to believe otherwise.

At that age, I thought adults knew everything.

I thought parents couldn't disappear.

I thought families didn't fall apart.

I thought difficult seasons were things that

happened to other people.

And perhaps that was the innocence of

childhood.

You don't know how fragile life is because

nobody has taught you yet.

So you simply live.

You laugh.

You go to school.

You make friends.

You complain when your mother tells you to do something you don't want to do.

You dream about the person you will become

one day.

And you assume the people standing beside

you will still be there when you finally become

that person.

I didn't know how quickly a normal life could

become a memory.

I didn't know that one year could divide your

life into before and after.

I didn't know that one day, I would look back

at those ordinary afternoons and wish I could

return to them.

At the time, though, I was just Talia.

A girl who believed she had plenty of time.

A girl who thought her family would always be

together.

A girl who had no idea that life was already

preparing to teach her otherwise.