Home

I’ve spent my whole life hunting for a place that would finally exhale with me.
Not just a roof or a room but a terrain where my bones could unclench,
where the air recognized my name without asking me to shrink first.
I kept stitching scraps of belonging together,
patching them like a quilt I hoped would one day feel warm enough.

Every time I thought I’d found it
the ground trembled like it was tired of holding me.
Walls I trusted shifted into silhouettes.
People I dared to lean toward drifted into fog.
The home I built, plank by trembling plank,
dissolved between my fingers like smoke fleeing an open window.

There’s a special kind of quiet that comes after the collapse.
Not peaceful. More like the world has turned away
and left me with the echo of my own heartbeat,
too loud in the dark, too soft everywhere else.

Lately I feel the pull to stop searching.
To set down the map, the hope, the hunger
and let the storm take whatever is left of my compass.
There’s a tiredness that wraps around the ribs,
and some days it whispers that surrender is the only warm thing left.

But even in that lull, in that temptation to vanish,
I can feel some fragment of myself refusing extinction.
It flickers low, stubborn as an ember under wet ash.
It’s not triumphant. It’s not loud.
It’s just there, a tiny pulse saying
not yet.

Because giving up isn’t really what I want.
What I want is rest.
A pause.
A moment where the world isn’t asking for my reconstruction again.
A moment where I can exist without proof or performance.

Maybe the home I’ve been trying to build
isn’t a place I’ve been failing to find.
Maybe it’s a place that’s been quietly trying to form inside me
each time I stood back up,
each time I chose to stay,
each time I whispered my own name into the darkness just to hear it answer.

And maybe stopping the search
doesn’t mean disappearing.
Maybe it means letting the world meet me where I am for once,
while I rest long enough to rebuild the spark
for the next step forward.

-raverkub