emotionally homeless

I’ve been emotionally homeless for as long as I can remember.

Not because no one has ever loved me, but because love has never felt like somewhere I could leave my shoes by the door.

Every time I begin to settle in, I start looking for the exit.

I fold my feelings into neat little boxes, never fully unpacking them. I hang a few pictures on the walls of someone’s heart, but I keep the nails loose. I’ve learned not to decorate a place I might have to leave tomorrow.

I know what it feels like to be welcomed.

I don’t know what it feels like to belong.

So I become a visitor in every relationship, even the ones that beg me to stay. I sit on the edge of the couch instead of sinking into it. I memorize the floor plan, the escape routes, the sound of a voice before it changes its mind. I brace for the moment someone decides I’ve overstayed my welcome.

The hardest part is that I want a home more than anything.

I want to stop flinching at kindness. I want reassurance to last longer than a few hours. I want to believe that “I’m not going anywhere” isn’t just another sentence with an expiration date.

But my heart has been evicted too many times.

Now it carries everything it owns.

I carry old apologies that were never mine to make. I carry conversations that ended too soon, promises that dissolved, and every version of myself I abandoned because I thought becoming someone else would finally make me easy to keep.

People tell me to let my guard down.

They don’t realize my guard isn’t a wall.

It’s the only roof I’ve ever had.

Sometimes I mistake chaos for comfort because silence feels unfamiliar. Sometimes I confuse inconsistency with passion because unpredictability is the closest thing I’ve ever known to permanence. I chase people who make me feel like I have to earn my place because somewhere along the way I forgot that home isn’t something you’re supposed to audition for.

The loneliness isn’t that I’m alone.

It’s that I never stop feeling temporary.

I walk into people’s lives with my bags already packed. I love with one hand reaching for them and the other gripping the doorknob. Even on the happiest days, there’s a voice in the back of my mind whispering, “Don’t get comfortable. This won’t last”

I don’t want grand gestures anymore.

I just want somewhere my heart can exhale.

Somewhere I don’t have to shrink to fit or stretch to be enough. Somewhere I can have a bad day without fearing it’s my last. Somewhere my silence isn’t mistaken for distance and my tears aren’t treated like an inconvenience.

I don’t think emotional homelessness is the absence of love.

I think it’s spending your whole life believing love is borrowed.

Like you’re only staying until someone remembers you were never on the lease.

Maybe one day I’ll stop carrying my life in boxes.

Maybe one day I’ll believe that I don’t have to earn a key to someone’s heart by bleeding for it.

Maybe one day I’ll wake up and realize that I no longer feel like a guest inside my own soul.

Until then, I keep searching.

Not for another person to save me.

Just for one place inside someone, inside myself, anywhere where I can finally unpack, lock the door behind me, and stop wondering when I’ll have to leave.