Home Is the Misfit

My tongue no longer speaks

my childhood the same way.

Its sounds feel borrowed now,

fading like a story

I’m supposed to remember

but no longer feel.

My eyes don’t light up

for the “home” they say I should miss.

Relatives return as faces,

not connections

strangers wrapped in obligation,

memories I’m expected to carry

though they’ve never carried me.

And love;

love was handed to me

like a warning, not a gift.

I was taught to fear the warmth,

to hide the softness,

to never reach for a hand

because wanting one

was weakness.

So tell me

how do you say “I love you”

when the sentence was forbidden?

How do you learn to touch

when you were told

to stay untouched?

I became a ghost

between two worlds

too changed for one,

too foreign for the other.

A misfit dressed in a life

that never fully fits,

wandering hallways

no one else sees.

Some nights,

silence speaks louder

than any friend ever has.

The weight grows heavy

and the phone stays quiet

because who do you call

when trust feels temporary,

when people slip away

like seasons,

when even the one you once loved

is a chapter you can’t reopen

without bleeding?

Three years later,

I have a room full of proof—

assets, achievements,

the kind of life

I once begged for.

But it feels like a ladder

that rises

and rises

and never arrives.

Each step takes me further

from who I used to be,

but not closer

to who I’m supposed to become.

And I know

if I must leave once more,

I will pack it all down

to nothing again.

Because the only thing

I truly own

is myself

the one constant

in a world that keeps shifting

under my feet.

In every mirror

the truth stares back:

I stand alone.

And maybe that isn’t failure

maybe that is survival.

Maybe being unrooted

doesn’t mean broken

maybe it means

I was never meant

to belong to a place

made by someone else’s hands.

If I’ve learned anything,

it’s this:

home isn’t a family,

a country,

or a room filled with things.

Home is the person

who carried the weight at eighteen,

who stayed awake through every struggle,

who rebuilt from nothing

again and again.

Home is the survivor in the mirror.

Home is the misfit

who kept walking

even without a path.

Home is me.

And maybe

just maybe

being a misfit

means I was destined

to build a home

that never existed

until I became it.