Outgrowing Home

you come home after a long time away,
expecting it to feel the way it used to.
it doesn’t. and the confusing part is that nothing at home actually changed.

home stayed roughly the same. you’re the one who changed.
and you didn’t feel it happening, because change never announces itself,
it just accumulates while you’re busy surviving somewhere else,
and then one day you walk back through the same door
and everything is where it was and it’s you that doesn’t fit.

you go back for the peace. that’s the real reason, under all the other reasons.
there was a specific quiet this place used to give you.
you’d walk in and something in your chest would unclench.
you spend months away half-remembering that feeling,
and you come home and sit in the same chair and wait for it,

and it comes faint. or it comes for an hour and then thins out.
or it doesn’t come, and you sit there performing the memory of it,
trying to feel at home in the one place that was supposed to be automatic.

because to live away, you had to become someone who could.
someone who wakes up alone and handles it, who doesn’t need this house,
who built a whole functioning self out of not being here.
that self kept you alive out there. it worked.
and you cannot take it off at the door.
the person who comes home is not the person who left,
and you’re the only one who can feel the difference,
because from the outside you still look like you.

and here’s the part nobody prepares you for.
there’s no new home waiting to replace the old one.
you assume that’s the trade - you give up one home, you build another.
you don’t. the place you left for is where you function, not where you rest.
you know its bus routes and not its comfort.
it’s an address. it holds your things. it is not home
and it is quietly never going to be.

so you end up in between.
too changed for the old place, not rooted in the new one.
homesick in a way that has no cure,
because the home you miss isn’t a house you can drive to.
it’s a version of you that a place used to fit,
and that version doesn’t exist anymore, and neither does the fit.

i don’t have a resolution for this. i’ve stopped looking for one.
you don’t get the old peace back and you don’t build it new.
you just carry a small permanent unbelonging around with you
and learn to call it growing up.

home wasn’t the house. it was the match between you and the house.
and you’re the half that moved.

— K.S.