Nikki Yeager

At 20, I realize I'm relatively inexperienced. I have years to go and the events that now define me will eventually shift and melt and mold into something new and wonderful and much, much older.

But for now I have these memories- the few that really make me who I am. These are the moments that really boiled me down to my essence, made me feel the most like 'Nikki'. This is my list of the big 6 defining moments of my life.

In no particular order-

1) Building my futon/bunk bed during our first night in New York.

2) Watching Cambodia appear in front of me as my flight landed in Siem Reap.

3) Watching Cambodia disappear after takeoff

4) The hour leading up to my second year of district semi-finals in hurdles

5) Dropping out of college

6) Listening as my second grade teacher told me, "Nikki you're going to be a writer someday". Yes, I was 8, but it still counts.

So there it is. There I am. Nikki Yeager in a nutshell. So why am I writing this? Because this week I've revisited number 1 on a smaller scale and I feel like if I don't write the original experience down it'll someday be lost in the insignificance of old memories.

Here it is:

I remember that day perfectly. We'd been up since 6 a.m. and while Brian and my dad alternated sleeping in the passenger seat I spent my time driving the Uhaul or uncomfortably perched on an overturned bucket. After all I was the only member of our 3 person moving team that was small enough to fit my legs in the middle.

Someday in the afternoon we pulled up, signed a lease and got the keys. Our first apartment ever. Brian's first time with rent. My first time with relocation. All of our months of planning suddenly became real.

It didn't take long to unload- after all we didn't have much. On the other hand, our apartment didn't hold much. My dad waved goodbye and left us with our boxes.

There were so many boxes.

So Brian stared at the boxes in bewilderment, trying to put things in their place. But with a two person move across several states there's never a good place to start.

I set out to build out bed. It looked relatively harmless- a bunk bed with a futon on the bottom. The nice, neat box laid on our floor. I looked at it and thought, "this should take, what? An hour?"

Well an hour passed and I'd already attempted to put two pieces together five times, failed miserably and bruised two knuckles on the stupid metal framework. Three hours later and I still couldn't make sense of the non-pictoral, Japanese directions. Three and a half hours into it and I called my dad.

"I can't do this."

Being my dad, he replied something non-sympathetic and overly rational, "Just sit down the directions. Take a breathe and put the pieces together. Nikki, thousands of people have built beds, it's not impossible."

How does a girl argue with that? Thousands of people have done it.

So I took a breathe, cast the directions aside and thought about it. Fourteen tries later, I had the bottom done. With a little help from Brian holding up pieces while I used my little screw driver to attach rails and frames, I watched a bed appear... from my own two hands.

It was the first time I've ever build anything in my life and when I finally crawled up to the top bunk around 3 am laid back, having never felt so good. As panic for a new life sunk into Brian, euphoria for a seemingly impossible task lifted me up to heights I've rarely revisited.

I looked at my new apartment from up high and I thought to myself "I did it." And from that moment on I approached my new life with the same though "I built my bed. I can do anything in the world." And I have done anything I wanted to do in the world- anything I set my mind to.

Which I was reminded of this last week when I purchased and built both a bed and a storage unit. A muted sense of gratification came over me and I was repeatedly reminded of that night.

I did it.