Homesick

There’s a particular kind of quiet that follows returning - not peace, but something heavier. As if the world has resumed its old rhythm and I’ve forgotten how to step in time with it. Everyone says ‘you’re home now’ as though it’s an absolution, like it’s meant to soothe me, but the word tastes foreign, metallic in my mouth, as though it belongs to someone else.

I keep waiting for familiarity to sink in, for my body to remember where it belongs, but it doesn’t. The days stretch out wide and airless. I move through them like a ghost rehearsing the gestures of the living - the small talk, the smiling, the choreography of seeming whole. There’s a dissonance humming under everything. A sense that I’m inhabiting a version of my life that has already died and simply forgotten to lie down.

It isn’t that I miss anywhere. It’s that I seem to have misplaced the coordinates of myself. I used to know what I sounded like, what I wanted, where I was going. Now everything feels secondhand, thoughts, words, even the quiet before sleep. I keep waiting to feel the click of recognition, the internal yes of belonging. It never comes.

People talk about home as though it’s a place you can stand inside of, when really it’s more like a pulse - something that either moves through you or refuses. The walls could be painted any colour and it wouldn’t matter because this loss isn’t spatial; it’s cellular. It’s realising that stability no longer fits, that rest feels foreign and calm feels counterfeit, that you’ve become fluent in motion and now stillness tastes like ash.

I’m homesick for something I cannot name. Not a city or a language, but a version of myself that used to feel certain. Maybe that’s what it means to have lived in too many places: you scatter yourself so wide that when you finally stop moving, there’s not enough left in one place to recognise.

And so I keep calling this home, because it’s the word I’m meant to use, because it’s easier to pretend it still fits, even as I move through its rooms like a trespasser. Perhaps home isn’t where you arrive, but where the search finally ends - and I am still, endlessly, in motion.