1. The Boxes, Again
Moving house. Again. Some say you get used to it — that over time you learn to pack and unpack with ease. But it isn’t true. With every move, something inside me grows a little more uninhabited, as if the act of leaving kept carving tiny empty rooms inside me that no new address can fill.
I’ve moved so many times I’ve lost count. And I don’t just mean walls and ceilings — I mean leaving behind corners where the light sat just right, places where the silence knew me by name, windows that framed a rhythm I had only just begun to understand. Each time I close a door for the last time, there’s a faint feeling that I’m abandoning a version of myself who finally felt at home there.
There’s a kind of weariness you don’t notice at first: the kind that comes from never lying two nights in a row in the same bed. You learn the weight of temporary places, the way a room looks at you when it knows you won’t stay long enough to warm it. Everything becomes provisional — keys, routines, even the way you breathe.
It’s not the same as being lost. Those who are lost are still searching. I, on the other hand, no longer search. I just go. I wrap up the books, the paintings, the dog, what’s left — and I move on. There’s a strange discipline in this kind of drifting: you travel light, even when the weight inside you is heavy.
But I miss the ground beneath me. I miss that “home” that English expresses so well — not just a house, but the place that holds you, steadies you, remembers you. The place without quotation marks, without a lease, where even time recognises you when you walk in, the way an old friend lifts its face at the sound of your step.
And that’s what I long for: not a space, but a resting place. A spot that doesn’t move. A corner of the world that doesn’t shift when I turn my back. A quiet, steady place — a proper name for the return.