1. The last time you made the mistake of making a home out of a pair of arms and a soft smile, you learned the hard way that anything that moves, that can blame, that can cause ache does not deserve such an elevated status in your heart. Still, you are an anomaly, a wild thing hoping for a home. A sailor wishing to leave the ocean and return.

2. I still remember a day when your father had lifted you in his arms and told you that you are loved, more than you ever know. It was two days before the plane crash that took him. It was two days before I saw death dance in your broken eyes for the first time. I don’t think it ever stopped dancing there.

3. Yesterday, someone asked you, “who do you trust most in the world?” And you felt that your lips were sewn shut. Everybody you should love and trusts’ names felt rough and raw on your tongue like they were in a foreign language that you had become too ancient to learn. So instead you whispered your own name like a secret into the abyss and hoped no one saw the sadness that had crawled it’s way along with your name out of your mouth.

4. A summer ago, you asked me what it was like to not need a place to call home. I know you asked this from a place of trauma, that your trauma has convinced you it will all be okay once you find a home. But it is lying, because what you need up find is your healing. And I told you that wanderlust had etched itself so ornately into my bones that I had no choice but to travel till it had sated itself. You looked at me with envy, even as I thought of all the people who would love to make a home of your heartbeat. You however were looking for a certain kind of love that you would call your very own. A kind of love that would never abandon you the way everyone you have ever loved has.

5. Something about you glowed bigger and better than all the stars we gazed at in the night sky. And even then, even when you had everything, you longed for a human to belong in. But everytime you laid the foundations for something good, they came crashing and tumbling down on your head. Because your trauma is a perfectionist and no one could quite become what you needed and wanted at the same time.

6. I wish I had told you then what I told you in that very last letter before I left. That child, why did no one ever teach you that you cannot turn people into homes? People are rivers, ever changing, ever flowing. They will disappear with everything you put inside them. Still, that home you are hunting for does have a heartbeat. But it isn’t one locked in anyone else’s chest. Just look inside your own.