Now, home feels like calm early mornings when I’m the only one awake, but the flat is full of my silent sleeping loved ones. Golden morning light hits the rooftops across from my window and the coffee is fragrant as it brews, and I’m basking in the quiet, in the ripe potential of the new day.

Home feels like always always tidying up, wiping stickiness off the worn edges of our things. The veneer of our kitchen table, my mother-in-law’s wedding gift, is chipping, the yellowing faux-wood laminate is bubbling where water spilled a few too many times. Family photos and kid art are blue-tacked to marked magnolia walls that really need a lick of paint. And a pile of projects, started-but-not-finished-in-any-kind-of-timely-fashion balances precariously on the dining room shelf.

I feel like I spent a lot of my life running from the familiar that was my parents home, seeking something else. Something different, something better, less familiar. But don’t I just find myself now, caught like a moth in pine sap, stuck deep into my own version of the familiar, here with my family in a place that feels like home.