New Home

I. The door was already open. I stepped in because the wind said nothing else would.

No greeting. No scent of bread, no ghost of firewood, no shadow waiting to smile.

Just silence, stacked like old books in corners too wide to hold meaning.

II. They told me to begin again. They said it like it was easy— as if memory were a coat you could leave by the door and forget.

But I brought mine. All of it. Frayed, soiled with goodbyes. It sits with me now, in this place I do not yet name.

III. Some mornings I try to speak aloud, just to hear something familiar. But the words don’t fit the walls here. They fall, like leaves no one asked to rake.

Still— I whisper them. Not for answers. For echoes. Sometimes, that’s all that’s left of love.

IV. I found a chair by the window. It faces a hill that doesn’t know my name. The light there is different. Softer, maybe. Or simply more honest. It does not pretend to welcome. It just falls. And that, somehow, is mercy.

V. This is not home. Not yet. But it is here. And I am here. And perhaps, in time, one of us will forgive the other for that.