Home is a loose end

Home is an instinct.

It is the body of a lover that you can recognise in the dark.
It is a momentary glimpse of the familiar, a stare that reflects on your soul; a feeling that makes sense in its wholeness, but cannot be dissected, felt or analysed in smaller parts.
Home is a birthmark.

Home is memory.
A scar on your skin from when you were little, the smell of your mother’s embrace and the voices of your loved ones.
It is the room that eases your fear after a nightmare, the refuge after a long day, the place where solitude becomes bearable.
Home is comfort.

Home was comfort.
It is the last drag of a cigarette — the calm that costs.
It lingers like smoke on your hands, like love that never holds.
You exhale, and it dissolves.
Home is despondency.

Home is dichotomy.
It is the space between union and rupture, the line between the crisis and the reckoning.
It is a resilient giant, bruised, stubborn, and endlessly self-forgiving. It stands tall on borrowed strength, dressed in its own contradictions: pride and exhaustion, fear and endurance.
It is the dissonance between love and disappointment, between the soil that raised you and the one that lets you breathe.
Home is flight.

Home betrays.
It disappoints change and bends your truth.
It is a notice of debts due in silence, and bonds sustained by distance.
Home is a solitary, mundane search for a semblance of normality, a sense of belonging.
Home is detachment.

Home bleeds.
It is where you love deep and breathe shallow.
Where you are whole with an abundance of gilded cracks.
Home will push you away — and as you break away, you’ll also break free and break your heart.
And you are lucky, nevertheless.
Home is guilt.

Home is a load.
You will carry it around and it will slow you down, but you won’t fit through its doors.
You will love it beyond reason and detest it because you do.
Home will not grant you closure.
Home is a loose end.