©ESR 2026

(for Echo, who is still searching for a home that wants to keep her)

I signed the papers.
Turned the key.

Closed the door behind me
one final time.

The house I grew up in…
the one that never quite grew around me…
is someone else’s now.

Their memories will cover mine
like paint on old walls.

And I walked out knowing
I wouldn’t be back.

There’s no one waiting for me
on that street,
no porch light left on,
no ghosts worth chasing.

My father is somewhere softer now.
A place with warm meals and grown children, grandchildren, and greats…
who speak kindly
but won’t know
what my laugh sounds like
in his memory.

He will forget me.
And it won’t be his fault.

It will just be
what time does
to every bond.

My mother’s memory…
a cage of cold hands and regret…
still lingers in the drywall of my past,
and I cannot bring her into the word home
without flinching.

And so I am left
with an empty driveway
and a title deed
that reads like a farewell letter
to the little girl I once was.

Where do you go
when home is no longer a place
and never was a person?

Where do you place your grief
when even the backyard
where you chased fireflies
has been re-sodded by strangers
who never learned your name?

I carry home now
in fragments.

In the scent of old leaves
and hand soap that smells like 1997.

In a crooked photo of me and my father
from the one weekend
he looked at me like I was enough.

I carry home in my chest
like a locked drawer
with no map to the key.

But I think…
maybe…
home was never meant to be something I lost.

Maybe it’s something I will have to build.
From scratch.
From poems.
From people who don’t look like family
but feel like belonging.

From my own damn hands.

And one day,
I will light a candle in my own apartment
and call it sacred.

I will fold the laundry,
make tea,
leave the porch light on
for myself.

And I’ll whisper:

“This is home now.
Not perfect.
But mine.”