What We Almost Called Home

Written by Rosene Rijh Almindras

They say home is a place, but I’ve never really believed that.

Places don’t stay with you the way people do. They don’t show up in the middle of the night when everything is quiet. They don’t linger in the small things—like a song you didn’t expect to hurt, or a name you still haven’t learned how to say without feeling something.

If I’m being honest, most of what I’ve called “home” were things that almost became it.

I’m twenty-one, and I used to think life would start when everything finally made sense. But it doesn’t. It starts in the middle of confusion, in moments you don’t even realize matter until they’re already over. Mine started in conversations I replayed too many times, in feelings I didn’t know what to do with, in learning how to sit with things that never really had an ending.

For a while, I thought home could be a person.

Not in a big, dramatic way. Just… quietly. In the kind of comfort that doesn’t need explaining. In knowing someone is there, even if they’re not really there. I thought maybe home was something you build out of small, ordinary things—shared music, random details, the way someone slowly becomes familiar.

But I guess you can’t build anything real out of “almost.”

Almost talking.
Almost saying what you mean.
Almost being something to each other.

And there’s a kind of sadness that comes with that—one that’s hard to explain. Because nothing really ended. But nothing really started either. So you’re left holding onto something that technically was never yours.

Still, it felt real to me.

I missed what could have been. I missed the version of me who believed it might turn into something more.

And maybe that’s where everything shifted a little.

Because I started to realize that home isn’t supposed to feel uncertain all the time. It isn’t supposed to depend on whether someone stays or leaves. It isn’t something you have to keep fixing in your head just to make it hurt less.

Lately, I think home is something quieter.

It’s the moment you stop waiting for something to happen.

It’s sitting with yourself and not feeling like you have to run. It’s getting used to your own thoughts, even the ones that don’t make sense yet. It’s learning that you can hold your own weight, even on days when everything feels a little too much.

I used to think I’d find home somewhere—like it was already out there, just waiting for me to get to it.

Now I think… maybe I’m still in the process of building it.

In the way I keep going, even when I don’t feel ready.
In the way I let myself feel things without trying to hide them.
In the way I’m slowly learning not to leave myself behind.

Maybe home isn’t where everything stays.

Maybe it’s just the place you come back to—
even if that place is finally yourself.

And for now, I think that’s enough.