Chapter 23: 18 Addresses
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I was born in a country that wasn't mine.
Madrid, Spain. March 22, 1985. 4:30 in the morning, local time. My mom was in a Spanish hospital where nobody spoke English and nobody cared that a twenty-something American woman was screaming through contractions. They'd seen it before. Military wives showed up, had babies, disappeared. It was routine for them.
Here's the thing about 4:30 AM in Madrid: back in Louisiana, where my family was from, it was still March 21. 9:30 PM the night before. I was born in two different calendar days depending on where you stood.
My dad found out I'd arrived while it was still yesterday in America. His son was born tomorrow. Two dates. One moment. I've never fit neatly into a single box.
I think about that sometimes. Born in a country that wasn't mine, on a date that depends on the time zone, to an Air Force Full Colonel who treated orders like gospel and moving trucks like old friends. The ambiguity was built in from the first breath.
It wasn't routine for me. I just didn't know it yet.
By the time I was two, we were in Monterey, California. By the time I was three, Moss, Norway. I have exactly zero memories of Monterey and one memory of Norway — standing in snow that came up to my chest, thinking this was just what the world looked like. Cold and white and endless.
I didn't know other kids stayed in one place. I didn't know they had the same bedroom for five years, the same best friend from kindergarten through fifth grade. I thought everyone's life came in two-year chapters. You show up. You unpack. You figure out who's cool and who's dangerous on the playground. You make a friend. You lose that friend. You pack. You do it again.
Eighteen times before I was twenty-four.
Madrid. Monterey. Moss. Colleyville, Texas. Las Vegas. Oslo, Norway. Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Burke, Virginia. Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico. Back to Maxwell. Back to Holloman. Honolulu. Back to Honolulu. Then Ole Miss. Then a swimming pool at 1:20 AM.
If you're counting, that's not eighteen. But when you factor in the temporary housing, the TLF apartments, the weeks spent in hotels between bases waiting for quarters to open up — yeah. Eighteen addresses. I've got the forwarding labels to prove it.
There were women who knew our forwarding address better than we did.
Bonnie. Barbara. Carolyn. Dad's secretaries at the various bases, over the years. They were the ones who processed the orders. They knew before we did, sometimes — the assignment would come through the office and Bonnie would already have the forms pulled before Dad had a chance to call Mom. They tracked every move. Every PCS. Every "pack out date" and "report no later than" and "temporary housing authorized through."
I didn't understand what those women were until I was older. They were the administrative backbone of a family's entire geography. They knew our addresses back through the chain — where we'd been, where we were going, what boxes the Air Force had to check before they could ship us somewhere new. They were professional witnesses to the constant motion of military life.
Carolyn once called my mom to give her a heads-up about a move before Dad had officially received the orders. Just — "I wanted you to have time to prepare." That's not in the job description. That's a human being who understood what all that moving cost a family and did what she could.
I never told any of those women what their jobs meant to us. You don't, at the time. You're a kid. The logistics are invisible to you. You just show up at a new house. But Bonnie, Barbara, Carolyn — they were holding the thread. Every address on the list ran through their hands first.
People romanticize military brats. They say we're "adaptable." "Resilient." "Cultured." That we can walk into any room and read it in thirty seconds.
All of that's true.
Here's what they don't say: we're also the kid who never fully unpacks.
Not literally — Mom made sure every box was emptied within forty-eight hours. She ran that house like it was her own command. No, I mean the emotional version. There's a part of you that stays in the box. The part that knows better than to put down roots because roots just get ripped up.
Colleyville, Texas. I was four. Dad was at some base nearby — I don't even remember which one. What I remember is the heat. Texas heat that melts crayons and makes grown men walk funny. I remember a kid named Jason who had a trampoline in his backyard. I spent every afternoon on that trampoline. Jason was my best friend for eight months.
I never saw Jason again.
Las Vegas. I was five, almost six. People hear Vegas and think strip clubs and slot machines. When you're five, Vegas is just a place where the dirt is a weird orange color and there are mountains in your backyard that look like they're from another planet. I made a friend — some kid in my class whose name I've genuinely lost. He had a Nintendo. That's all I remember. He had a Nintendo and then we moved.
Oslo. Now Oslo I remember. I was seven. Norway round two. International school. Kids from every country you could name, all of us pretending we understood each other. The snow was different there than in Moss — wetter, heavier. The kind that sticks to everything. I learned to ski. I learned that darkness can last twenty hours a day in winter and your body just accepts it. I learned that recess in Norway means going outside no matter what the weather is doing, which is a philosophy I still respect.
I also learned what it feels like to be the new kid for the fourth time. You walk into a classroom and everyone already has their person. Their seat. Their inside jokes. And you're standing at the door with a backpack that still has the airline tag on it, trying to figure out the rules.
The rules are always different. Every base, every school, every neighborhood — different rules. In Texas, you fought if someone disrespected you. In Norway, you talked it out like tiny diplomats. In Alabama, you said "yes sir" and "no ma'am" or you got a look from your mother that could strip paint.
Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. First time. I was eight. Then Burke, Virginia. Then Holloman AFB, New Mexico. These blur together if I'm honest. Not because they didn't matter but because that's what survival looks like when you're a kid who's moved six times before middle school — you stop building the full picture. You sketch it. Quick outline. Name of the school. Name of one friend. Name of the street. Move on.
Burke was the D.C. suburbs. I remember the commute being long and my dad being tired. I remember green — Virginia green, which is different from any other green. Old trees. Thick air. History in every direction.
Holloman was the desert. Stark. Empty. The kind of place where you can see weather coming from fifty miles away. White Sands on the horizon. I was eleven. By this point I'd perfected the new-kid routine. Walk in confident. Find the funny kid. Make him laugh. Now you're in.
That's the military brat superpower, by the way. We're not charming because we want to be. We're charming because we have to be. Every two years, you're auditioning for a new life. You learn to read a room before you enter it. You learn to be interesting fast, because you don't have time to be boring.
The flip side? You also learn that everything is temporary. Every friendship has an expiration date stamped on it, and you can usually calculate it based on your dad's orders. Two years. Maybe three if you're lucky. Don't get too comfortable.
Let me talk about high school, because the high school years deserve their own accounting. This is not a clean story.
It started with Mom. Three months of homeschooling — she pulled me out of whatever situation I was in, sat me down at the kitchen table, and handled it herself for a semester. That was its own education. Mom running a classroom looks like: organized, no nonsense, somehow both more rigorous than any school I'd attended and warmer than any of them too. But three months isn't a high school career.
Alamogordo High School. Holloman. The desert. That was next. I was doing the new-kid thing again, running the routine, getting by.
Then Dad got new orders, and I ended up at St. Paul's.
Boarding school, mid-freshman year. Which is a specific kind of brutal — not just new kid, but new kid at a place where everyone else already has their dorm, their group, their territory, and you're arriving with a single duffel bag in the middle of the school year like something that got lost in the mail.
I'll tell you what happened there because this book doesn't do omissions. There was a night — I don't remember exactly when in the sequence of bad nights it fell — when I went into a closet with the intention of not coming out. Hanging. That was the plan.
There was a guy named Aliocha.
He found me. Or heard me. I'm not entirely clear on the sequence, and some details your brain will helpfully blur when it decides you don't need them in high definition. But Aliocha was there. He was the reason I didn't die in a closet at a boarding school during the worst stretch of my freshman year.
I don't dwell on it. I'm not going to give it more real estate than it gets. It happened. I survived it. Someone whose name I still say with gratitude pulled me back from the thing I was about to do, and then we both went back to being fifteen-year-olds at a boarding school and pretended, as teenagers do, that this was just what life was like.
But it's part of the list. Part of the addresses. St. Paul's is on the map.
After that: Montgomery Catholic. First full year at a single school, after all the disruption. I remember thinking: maybe this is it. Maybe we stay. There was something stabilizing about it — one whole year in the same building with the same people. I started to learn what accumulation felt like. What it meant to have history with a place instead of just a catalog entry.
We didn't stay.
Saint Stanislaus boarding school. Mississippi. I graduated from there in 2004. Four years. The longest I'd been anywhere. I had real friends by the end of it — guys I knew well enough to fight with and forgive and trust. When I left for Ole Miss, it actually hurt.
First time moving had made me cry since I was old enough to understand what moving meant.
Ole Miss. Oxford, Mississippi. This was supposed to be mine. Not Dad's assignment. Not the Air Force's decision. My choice. I picked it. Hospitality Management. I was going to run hotels, manage resorts, be the guy in the nice suit making sure everyone else was having a good time. Which, if you think about it, is the most military-brat career choice possible. I'd spent my whole life being a guest everywhere. Might as well make it a profession.
I loved it. For the first time in my life, I was somewhere because I wanted to be. Not because a transfer order said so. I had a dorm room that was mine. Friends who weren't going anywhere. A routine that I built, not one that was assigned.
December 2008. I was about to graduate. I had a meeting in Manhattan — my first real business meeting. I passed Accounting, which felt like defusing a bomb. Everything was pointing forward. Career. New York. The future.
And then July 4th, 2009. 1:20 in the morning.
The nineteenth address was a hospital bed. I didn't choose that one either.
Here's what eighteen addresses teaches you that nothing else can:
It teaches you that home is not a building. It's not a zip code or a set of walls or a spot on a map. I learned that by elimination — by living in so many buildings that none of them could be "it."
It teaches you to travel light. Not just physically, but emotionally. You learn which feelings to pack and which to leave behind. You learn that grief over a lost friendship is real, but it's also portable — you can carry it without it crushing you.
It teaches you how to be alone in a room full of people. And how to be connected to people who are thousands of miles away.
It teaches you that identity isn't geography. I'm not Spanish because I was born in Madrid. I'm not Norwegian because I lived there twice. I'm not Texan or Virginian or Hawaiian. I'm all of them and none of them. I'm the kid who never belonged anywhere, which means I can belong everywhere.
And it teaches you one more thing — the thing that matters most.
It teaches you that when life breaks your body and plants you in one spot, when the chair becomes the only address that matters, you already know how to adapt. You already know that the place doesn't define you. You already know how to walk into a room you've never been in and figure out the rules.
Eighteen addresses prepared me for the nineteenth. Not because any of them were easy, but because none of them were permanent. And when I woke up in that hospital bed at Shepherd Center, unable to feel anything below my chest, the first thing my brain did wasn't panic.
It was what it always did.
Okay. New place. New rules. Figure it out.
Unpack what you can. Leave the rest in the box.
Keep moving.
Everything has an expiration date. That's the lesson that got stamped into me so early I can't remember not knowing it.
Friendships expire. Addresses expire. The version of yourself that fit the last place you lived — that expires too, the minute you pull into a new driveway. You have to become someone slightly different in each place. Not fake. Just adapted. The same core, different surface.
What I know now, from the vantage point of having been planted in one place by a pool and a broken neck, is that the expiration dates don't stop. They just change shape.
The able-bodied version of Chase expired on July 4th, 2009. That one hurt worse than any move. No forwarding address for that identity. No two-year countdown. Just: gone, and here's what's here instead.
But the kid who survived eighteen moves before he was twenty-four knew something about that. He knew how to grieve the old address and set up the new one. He knew that the discomfort of unfamiliar walls doesn't last. He knew that within a few months, anywhere can start to feel like somewhere.
The hospital became somewhere. Covington became somewhere. The chair became somewhere — the permanent address, the one I live in every single day, the one that goes with me regardless of what's outside the window.
Born at 4:30 AM in Madrid. Born the night before in Louisiana. Two dates, one moment, a life that never fit into a single box. I've been two things at once since before I drew my first breath.
That turns out to be exactly the right preparation for what came next.
There's a game military brats play, though nobody calls it a game. You meet another one — at a party, at a job, in a waiting room — and you just know. There's a frequency we operate on. A shared understanding that doesn't need explanation.
"Where are you from?" someone asks.
And you watch the other person's face do the same thing yours does: a micro-pause. A calculation. Do I name the birthplace? The longest stay? The most recent? Where my parents retired? The honest answer is "nowhere" and "everywhere" and "it's complicated," but nobody wants to hear that at a cocktail party. So you pick one.
"Louisiana," I say now. Because that's where I've been the longest. Mandeville. Covington. The Northshore. But Louisiana didn't become home until I was twenty-eight years old and in a wheelchair. Before that, it was just another stop.
My dad — the Air Force Full Colonel who flew F-117 Nighthawks and F-16 Fighting Falcons and treated orders like gospel — never talked about the moves like they were hard. They were missions. Logistics. You received orders, you executed. Mom was the translator between military efficiency and childhood emotion. She's the one who sat on the edge of my bed in Colleyville and explained that Norway would have snow and Vikings and a new school, and made it sound like an adventure instead of an uprooting.
Looking back, I don't know how she did it. Eighteen times she packed a household. Eighteen times she found the nearest grocery store, the closest school, the pediatrician who took Tricare. Eighteen times she turned a set of bare walls into a place that smelled like dinner and felt like something close to permanent. She was the constant in the equation. The one variable that didn't change.
Dad was the reason we moved. Mom was the reason we survived it. And Bonnie and Barbara and Carolyn were the reason the paperwork was right.
And me? I was the kid in the backseat, watching America — and Europe, and the Pacific — scroll past the window like a movie I didn't audition for.
I used to resent it. In my twenties, at Ole Miss, surrounded by kids who'd grown up in the same town their whole lives, I felt the gap. They had childhood bedrooms with height marks on the doorframe. They had a "spot" at the local diner. They had people who remembered them as babies. I had a list of zip codes and a talent for small talk.
I don't resent it anymore. Can't afford to. Resentment is heavy, and I've got enough weight to carry.
Besides — and this took me fifteen years and a broken neck to figure out — the kid who never belonged anywhere is also the kid who can land anywhere. And when your body becomes the only country you live in, when every morning starts with the same four walls regardless of the address, that skill becomes the only one that matters.
Adaptable. Resilient. Cultured.
Fine. I'll take it.
But also: lonely. Guarded. Permanently ready to leave.
Take that too.
That's the whole military brat. Not the brochure version. The real one.
Eighteen addresses. One kid. And eventually, finally, a man who stopped counting.