The day I left, I thought I left walls,
windows, the scent of old rain on the terrace.
I did not leave them. They folded into my chest,
secret compartments of light and shadow,
whispers of a room that knew my smallest triumphs.
Here, the streets speak another tongue.
The rain smells differently,
the birds sing unfamiliar names.
Yet in a sudden hush, a memory unspools —
my childhood window, the way sunlight fell
across a desk where I once wrote my first dreams,
the staircase I ran down laughing, barefoot,
the smell of bread from a distant kitchen.
I have built a life here:
a bright apartment, streets that never sleep,
windows that frame new skies.
Yet in the quiet, a fragment resists.
It hums in my chest, in the hollow of mornings,
in dreams that fold like origami
back to a street I once ran through,
where laughter was a language I spoke without knowing.
Years have passed, and still —
home travels with me like a shadow
bending, stretching, folding into moments
I did not think I remembered.
The air smells of somewhere else,
yet memory is a compass,
leading me to rooms I left behind
and to the self I became there.
I smile, I laugh, I adjust,
but I carry the first hearth in my bones,
its quiet insistence:
life moves forward, life flourishes,
but a part of us will always wander
through the hallways of first love, first loss,
first joy — a home we cannot leave,
because it travels with us,
always, silently, like a poem
we recite in our own language
when no one listens.