Prologue

9TH JUNE 2013

I am at school. It is recess and I'm with my friends playing tag when the school gets a call. The call that changes my life forever. It's my mom. She's not just sick; she's dying. Dad comes to pick me up early from school and take me to the hospital. I'm told that Mom has a disease that will kill her. My six and a half year old brain doesn't understand the word "death". I visit her for the next month, confused and scared when she doesn't remember who I am. I watch as she transforms from my Mom, who loves Beyonce but can't sing, to a stranger on her deathbed. When she goes into a coma, I realize she's not coming back.

But I stay strong. For her.

Not once do I cry until her funeral. As I watch my dad break down, reality hits me and I cry the tears of loss.

FOUR YEARS LATER

It is Mom's fourth death anniversary. Dad brought me and Grandma Yolie to the graveyard to see her. Grandma moved in with us just weeks after Mom died. She's the one that made the decision not to send me back to school because the disease had spread rapidly in the past years and it wasn't safe. Not anymore.

I'm secretly glad I didn't have to go back to school. I'd been treated differently since Mom died, tip toed around as if I am a piece of glass about to shatter at any second. None of my so called 'friends' stayed with me after my world fell apart. I was deserted by people I considered to be my best friends.

Today, 9th June 2017, is the day I'm told properly about the disease. Mom was the first ever patient of MER RAS 82, a dangerous disease for it's fatality. It has brought the world to it's knees in the four years of it's existence. Europe and America are threatened the most, with cases rising faster than they are recorded.

It's for this reason, Dad said, that we are moving from our cozy little house in Nashville to Dubai, where Dad had a new job and there was no signs of the disease.

I feel like Dad isn't telling me something, some facts he omitted, but I'm not quite sure what he could be hiding. He isn't one of those parents that believes in screening the truth from his children. This is what worries me.

However, I don't say anything. Instead, I silently pack up my belongings, my life, and forever leave behind the place I call home. Maybe it isn't home anymore, I think to myself, not without Mom anyway.

I prepare for a new life. A fresh start, as Grandma says. A new chance at life. New friends to make, new places to see. A new person to become. I brace myself for the change as we lock up the house and drive to the airport. I shake out my shoulders and take a deep breath as we walk through Customs at the airport. I say a quick prayer as we board the plane and watch as the place I once called home disappears from below me.

As if it never existed.