“A ghost wandering through a crowd of children”. The words of my second-grade teacher, in an ‘emergency’ meeting with my dad. Leaving Ghana and moving to America was a very defining moment in my life. In Ghana, I was surrounded by so many friends and family, I couldn’t ask for more. Being an only child I never felt a sense of loneliness, and if I did get a hint of that cold feeling as I sat down in the living room, my nanny would always nurture that withering fire back to life, into a vivid and frantic flame. I was never alone whether it was family or friends that surrounded me, but in America all that came to a drastic halt. I entered a new world in which I was the minority, and along with that I was not acquainted with anyone, I was overwhelmed. Every second of school eventually lead to me asking the question: what am I doing here; I didn’t belong. Though my parents were trying as best as they could to be supportive throughout the move, they could never understand unless they experienced my emotions for themselves. The only one who could truly understand is a sibling, a sibling that I never had. A sibling who would I could rely on to have my back throughout all the hardships we endure or understand me even as we may have had our differences, the same sibling I never had.

Sometimes as I strolled through the empty courtyard, I thought of this sibling, the one that I never had. As this thought circled in my mind they became a part of it. My mind became that sibling in which I could share experiences with, my mind became the sibling in which I found solace in, and my mind became my destination in which I had traveled a long way to find. 

You can be your place of refuge if you simply put your mind to it.