Eight thousand kilometers from where I first learned to tie my shoes, where the smell of summer remained the same for years, where the sound of the kitchen signaled that life was still happening around me, now I’m in a city where my name doesn’t echo back with familiarity, in the fourth apartment in nine months.
I find myself holding a calorie-free, alcohol-free, taste-free fake gin and tonic, staring at my computer and my endless to-do list, knowing that instead of paying medical bills, dealing with insurance, answering emails, and writing my new paper on the finally accepted topic by my mentor, I will watch hilariously bad Christmas movies with my pup sleeping next to me on the bed where he officially isn’t allowed but comfortably and confidently takes up more space than I do.
I used to hate moving. Ok, let’s be honest, I still hate moving. I hate not knowing where things are and having to live out of luggage and boxes. But it’s the third time this year that I’m packing in and out, and I’m surprised at how quickly I can make an empty apartment with four bare white walls look like a home again, as if it’s second nature now.
It’s not magic; home is where my body responds faster than my mind, home is the image of my dog curled beside me, it’s the way I walk barefoot across a floor I haven’t yet memorized, and how silence, if it lingers long enough, starts to feel like belonging. Home is the morning light on the kitchen counter when I didn’t think I’d be okay, but somehow, I am. It’s the first laugh that breaks the loneliness after days of quiet. It’s the drawer that now holds my favorite pen, the one I’ve carried through countries and continents like a talisman, he pen that signed contracts and wrote books, and in the past months,
it has written things no pen should ever have to write.
It has signed consent forms with shaking hands, and it has filled out paperwork in sterile waiting rooms
where the walls didn’t care what I was losing. It has signed victim statements, as if a signature could capture the shape of a wound. It has written reports and love letters, appeals, and documented what shouldn’t have happened.
It has signed my name in places where I wasn’t sure if I’d make it out the same. It has written goodbyes and heartfelt thank-yous, and it has written the words I thought were impossible to write.
It has written futures, too—on journal pages stained with tears, on vision boards taped to unfamiliar walls, in applications, intentions, and lifelines. It’s the pen that wrote a new address on every envelope,
as if each one might finally be the one that says: stay.
Lastly, but not finally, it has signed a lease and my name on a new postal box again, and now it is already shaking, dancing, restlessly waiting for the next adventure to write.
This time, I don’t have wishes or unrealistic expectations. I just want my home to be nothing more than a deep breath that isn’t interrupted by fear, a decision to light a candle because flame makes me feel less alone, the moment I stop trying to make sense of it all and just let the ache stay with me a little longer as proof that I am still alive. I just want to be happy for my friends who know the address that I can’t tell anyone.
I always thought home was something to find, like in romantic movies; I wanted it to be a place waiting quietly for me somewhere, like a room with the light left on, like a new love that would recognize me before I had to explain myself. I wanted it to be just there.
But now I know, home isn’t found, it’s built, brick by bloody brick, and it’s built on the smoking ruins of the life you swore you couldn’t live without. You build it on the shattered remains of every “before,”
every door you can never walk through again.
And to build it, you have to make it impossible to go back, because you will want to.
Oh God, you will want to.
You’ll ache for the softness of the old world when your chest is cracked open from heartbreak, when your skin burns from being misunderstood, when the grief rolls in like a tide you thought you’d already survived, when even your hairbrush feels too heavy to hold, when the silence is so sharp it cuts your name in half, when you are not just lonely but really, undoubtedly alone, naked in your becoming, staring at the walls and wondering if you’ve made a mistake.
You’ll want to crawl back when you face rejection again and again and again, when your voice shakes from saying what matters and nobody listens, when you are lost in the dark and your only companion is pain dressed as doubt.
But. You are more stubborn than afraid. It’s what your mother said since you were a little girl. “There is no medicine against you.”
You know you won’t betray the version of you who kept going with bloody knees and a shaking spine, and a dream so sacred she held it like a burning coal.
So you light the matches, you throw the bombs. You burn the bridges, so they don’t tempt you to turn back. You don’t turn back; you just realize there are no sirens singing to you anymore. It’s quiet now, and you whisper to the smoke: let it be done.
You stop counting the cost, as it has already been paid, in exile, in endings, bruises, scars that can not be healed, and in the loss of what mattered most.
And then, when you are broken and breathless and no longer pretending, when you are literally lying on the floor in your own blood, staring at the ceiling, wondering if there is tomorrow, then you meet yourself. This is not the kind of self-knowledge the books talked about, all the books you read, all the years you studied. This is beyond theory; it’s raw and ugly. And you are afraid of your own answer, but you keep asking the same question: What am I still willing to lose to finally arrive in the life I was born for?
Lately, when someone asks if I like the sauna, I no longer say there was one in my house once, how the steam knew my skin like an old lover, how I sit there every day swearing that next time I won’t bring my phone until it’s too hot to handle. When they ask if I drive, I don’t tell the story of the road trips with dogs in the back of the car, the border crossings at dawn, in the old Volvo, through countries, heartbreaks, and mornings that smelled like freedom and curiosity.
When they ask what I have—a car, a microwave, a hair straightener, a mic for the podcasts and professional lights—I just say no, because if it’s not here, if I can’t hold it in this life I’m building now, then I no longer call it mine. I no longer need to gather ghosts to prove I once belonged to something.
Only one sentence still tastes like grief when they ask how many dogs I have, I bite the inside of my cheek not to say two.
One. I have one dog. Only one. And still, in that answer, the echo of two follows me home. To the home that I keep building, with mismatched mugs and in someone else’s old sweaters, while I continue to do the things I thought I never would be able to do, I I still scoop out two portions at mealtime, still reach for two of everything in the store without thinking, still pause at the cupboard, waiting for the sound of paws that will never come. I still move to make space on the couch, forgetting there’s no second body to fill it, still open the door a little wider, as if both noses will nudge through at once, still catch myself whispering “you two,” before I remember it’s just him now.
Grief sucks. It’s everywhere; it lives in habits your body hasn’t unlearned, it shows up in the second bowl you no longer need, in the leash that still hangs by the door, in the instinct to count to two—
when now, there’s only one, in the soft rustle of a blanket untouched, in the rhythm of footsteps that no longer echo in pairs, in the way your heart waits for a reunion your mind already knows won’t come.
I’m building a home, a small space with some rooms, carpets, and furniture chosen with hope, and pictures on the wall, trying to call a few square meters surrounded by concrete a safe place in a world that’s losing its mind—a bubble in a world that no longer feels like home.
