The road back home is longer than I remember. My feet are burning, dusty and bare. But it doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve walked too long in the wrong directions. I don’t even know if anyone’s still waiting. I never got to see them grow. Or age…
I remember the moment I left. I was fourteen. The morning sky was as gray as a rug brush forgotten in dirty water. My brothers and sisters stood in the doorway. Big eyes. Tight lips. Tiny hands clinging to shirt hems, like birds who hadn’t yet learned how to fly. I walked away without looking back, but I felt her eyes burning into my neck. My mother didn’t say anything. No “Take care.” No “Don’t you dare come back.” She just stood there, arms crossed, like a barricade I stepped over without breaking. (Or maybe I broke her.) I told myself I didn’t care.
Outside, the world smelled like promises.
I ran, my heart screaming, my skin too tight for all the life I wanted to fit inside it. I wanted to become someone. To show the world I was more than the eldest girl from a family too big, more than another mouth to feed. I studied. I worked. I pushed myself until I reached a place no one had imagined for me: Television. I wrote the news. I presented other people’s realities while hiding my own so well. I thought I had made it. I thought the world was mine.
Then I said “Yes.” To a man who preached love but wrung the life out of me like a wet rag. His words were the first cage. The blows, of all kinds, the second. A relationship that wrapped itself around my throat until I couldn’t breathe. Until I believed I was the problem. Until there was nothing left of the girl who had once left home to become someone. Then, one day, I found the strength to leave. I don’t know where it came from. Maybe from the last flicker of light inside me. Maybe from an older version of myself, the one who would’ve never let herself be crushed. Maybe God, whom I had learned to see through the wrong people’s eyes, reached out and opened the door.
I ran again.
But the world was no longer full of promises. I was no longer the young journalist with her whole life ahead. No longer the victim trapped in a toxic marriage. I was just a shadow of what I once believed I’d be. I looked around and saw that everything I’d built was hollow. A world of success without meaning. A house without warmth. A path without destination. A wound no one could see anymore. Everything collapsed beneath me like a castle of cards. And I, crushed, remained the joker with no ace up my sleeve.
The money was gone. The people vanished. I found myself on the ground, among the ruins. Alone. Empty. In a pigsty, with a newspaper page stuck to my cheek. On it, a missing woman. It wasn’t my name. But the look in her eyes was mine.
There, in the muck, from a place I had tried to kill within me, a thought re-sprouted: Home.
My sisters, sleeping in the same bed, whispering secrets into the night. My little brother’s hand reaching for me in the dark. I saw them again, all of them, at the threshold. Like dolls I had broken. I saw myself turning my back on them. How I tore the family apart. Me and them. My father … how he saw me off to the train that led to nowhere. Maybe he knew. Maybe he knew that his wisdom wouldn’t shield me, wouldn’t keep me warm. Maybe he knew that if he stopped me, I’d hate him forever. Maybe he knew that, that morning, he both gained me and lost me.
I felt I had to go back. But how? With what face? I’m no longer who I was. Not the girl who left. Not the woman who thought she could live without home. I’m someone else now, broken, tired, but more aware than ever of what I was truly missing.
I stepped into the street. Someone glanced at me. Someone else threw me a coin. No one asked if I was okay. I laughed. I cried. I stood up. And I began stumbling toward home. The road is long. My soul, empty. Thoughts, sharp like nails hammered into raw flesh. Shame, heavy on my shoulders, like a sack of stone.
I see the house in the distance. My heart hammers in my chest.
I barely get close before I see him. Running toward me. Arms stretched wide—wider than the world! I wanted to hide, but the ground didn’t open to swallow me.
“Dad…”
I want to say more. I want to tell him I don’t deserve to be his daughter, that I have nothing left to offer him, that I sold my life for cheap illusions. But he doesn’t let me finish. He hugs all my failures, all my fear, my whole story. He washes them away as if none of it mattered.
“Welcome home, my child! This moment MUST be celebrated!”
He holds all my filth in his arms. He doesn’t scold me. Doesn’t ask where I’ve been, or why. Doesn’t demand answers. Or balance. He just welcomes me. He’s the same. Or maybe even thirstier for me, the one who disappointed him most. Home had never been a house. Not the door I slammed. Not the road I took. Home was Him. Home had always been His arms. Home was where I was loved even when I didn’t deserve it. Especially then.
Behind him, like statues, are the amplified versions of my brothers and sisters. My mother isn’t among them. They all look at me, long and blank. Some turn their heads. Others fold their arms. The eldest, the one who stayed, who rebuilt what I had broken, the good son, looked at me with disdain and clenched his fists. He ran to our father.
I walk in, searching for her. My heart pounding, knees weak, thoughts scattered. The house smells of bread and half-whispered prayers. I take a step. The floor creaks with recognition and whispers: “Why did you come?”
“Mom?”
Nothing.
I cross the threshold of the kitchen, where the steam of the past still clings to the walls. I pass the table where I once learned to peel potatoes and stuff silences between crumbs.
“Mom!”
I climb the stairs, one hand on the banister, like a blind woman searching for a path.
And then I see her. In her room. Sitting on the bed. Her back to me. Shoulders of a woman who’s held too much inside. I hold my breath.
“You came back,” she says.
Her voice is a fraying thread barely holding a button. I walk closer. I don’t know what to say.
“I didn’t know if you died or if you just decided we were already dead.”
Her words choke me. She turns toward me. Her eyes carry no tears, no anger. Just a tiredness stitched into her brow, her cheeks. Then, she does something unexpected: she touches my shoulder. For just a second. Long enough for mw to feel the warmth under her fingers. Like a fingerprint after too many empty years. It was the longest embrace she ever gave me.
“Come eat.”
And then I knew.
This time, I will leave again. But not to run. I will leave because I understand. Maybe home isn’t a place you return to in order to stay, but one you leave from, more whole each time. Home gave me roots. It gave me lessons. My father showed me that love doesn’t measure distance. And my mother, that sometimes, silence is also a kind of embrace. I’ll carry my siblings’ voices with me. But I will no longer carry the fear of failing. I choose to leave again, this time for lands even stranger, Dutch lands. Not because I’m not okay here, but because I can’t stay.
This time, I don’t leave to find an identity. I leave to build a life that doesn’t feel like betrayal.
This time, I don’t let the past follow me like a shadow. I take it by the hand, look it in the eyes, and place it, gently, where it belongs: behind me.