I grew up in a lot of homes. It happens when your parents aren’t just poor, but also drug addicts. So for me, it’s interesting to go on Google Maps and see the ones that I’ve lived in and how they’ve changed.

I remember one particular house in Sweetwater, Texas. We lived there around '97, which would have made me 4-5 years old. These are my earliest memories so I’ve worked hard to keep them.

My younger brother and I shared a red bunk bed. I believe it had a slip cover to look like a firetruck. We had a Super Nintendo. We grew up playing a lot of Mortal Kombat. The old man wasn’t known for taking it easy on us so on the off chance someone beat him for whatever reason, it was the one time we got away with cussing. Yes, I would tell my father I beat his ass. But there was another kid our age across the street. His name was Bo, and Bo had a Nintendo 64. So we’d go over there and play Mario Kart with him a lot. We had a Power Wheels Jeep that got a bit of a sun bleaching from red to pink. It didn’t have a battery either so my brother and I would take turns pushing each other in it. This was the year I started going to school. I remember the name of my Kindergarten teacher. I remember how every day, she turned off the lights for an hour for nap time. I remember never falling asleep at nap time so I’d lay there and count the ceiling tiles to kill time. About a week after we did pictures, the teachers all did this thing for the kids over the weekend. They assembled a collection of boxes and made a box fort in the gym and we got to have a day playing around in it. That might be a core memory for me. I remember being unable to explore every nook and cranny of the thing, even though I’m sure that it wasn’t all that big.

And yeah, I remember the address of that house. When we lived there in the 90s, it was yellow. I thought it was such a nice and cool house at the time. But when I pull it up on street view, man is it dilapidated. And it never was in good repair, either.

Learning that kinda put a tarnish on all those memories from that time in my life. But I don’t mind taking off the rose tinted glasses. My childhood kinda sucked in a lot of ways. Parents with drug addictions will do that. But I still cherish those memories. That was the best my childhood was ever going to be.

The happy note to end this one on is that I did make it to adulthood. I ended up in foster care. I got to go to and graduate from college. I’ve got a job in the field I studied, and while I’m not filthy rich, I got to buy a house with my wife the day before I turned 30. We keep our bills paid, and we get to go on vacation every couple of years. I’ve been to therapy, I took it seriously, and I found my will to live. I still get that voice in the back of my head that degrades me, but I’ve learned that voice is also wrong a lot of times, and I learned how to dismiss it. So yeah, I’m doing alright now. Took a while, but the important part is I made it. My brother did too.