An Ode to who i call “Home”

There are people
who enter a life without ceremony.

No herald announces them.
No constellation rearranges itself
to mark their arrival.

They simply appear—

a name on a screen,
a voice at an unreasonable hour,
a stupid joke repeated often enough
to become scripture.

And then, imperceptibly,
they become architecture.

A room inside the chest.
A light left burning.
A door that does not require knocking.

I have been fortunate
in the particular way
that misfits are fortunate:

I have found other misfits.

One is a clam shell.

Closed against the weather,
quietly guarding an entire ocean
behind the unassuming architecture
of herself.

And then she opens—

and pearls.

Pearls everywhere.

Laughter like sunlight
scattered across water,
a kind of incandescent happiness
that makes proximity feel
like having stepped briefly
into summer.

She is beautiful
precisely because she is singular.

The world, predictably,
does not always know what to do
with singular things.

So it throws stones.

It calls cruelty honesty
and contempt a joke.

But there are treasures
one does not leave undefended.

There are pearls
for which one would bare the teeth.

If the world insists upon wounding
what it cannot understand,

then let it learn
what tenderness becomes
when sharpened into protection.

Another carries
a sweetness almost too delicate
for the way he treats himself.

He is forever standing
before an imaginary tribunal,
presenting evidence
for his own inadequacy.

Forever finding fault
in the architecture of his existence.

And I wish, sometimes,
that I could lend him my eyes—

just briefly—

so he might see himself
without the distortion
of his own prosecution.

There is so much gentleness there.

So much quiet intelligence.

The sort that appears
only after midnight,

when conversation sheds
its polite little garments
and becomes something deeper—

two people descending
through the floorboards of the ordinary
until they find the strange machinery
beneath being alive.

A comrade.

A fellow collector
of useless knowledge.

A soft-hearted creature
who does not yet seem to understand
how precious softness is.

Another is stranger territory—

a former chapter
that somehow became
a younger brother.

Affection survived the metamorphosis.

It merely changed its clothes.

The tongue can be merciless,
but sometimes love speaks
in the dialect of provocation:

a sharpened remark,
a theatrical insult,
a particular sort of cruelty
that somehow means,

you are safe enough
for me to be ridiculous with you.

And so there is cooking.

There are meals prepared
with the quiet intimacy
of an offering.

There are conversations
that wander wherever they please.

There is trust—

the sacred, absurd trust
of handing someone
the care of my smallest child,

my little gecko,

my scaly sovereign,

and knowing that the tiny creature
will be safe in their keeping.

There was a beginning here, too.

One of the first adventurers
to sit at my table
while I was still learning
how to conjure worlds from dice.

Perhaps that is why
some part of them will always belong
to the mythology of my life.

And gods know—

I hope someone loves them
with unbearable sweetness.

Someone patient enough
to survive the attitude.

Someone who can look past
the sharpened tongue
and recognise the tenderness
concealed beneath it.

Another has become
a constant frequency.

A voice threaded through
the ordinary machinery of my days.

Jokes.

Nonsense.

Long conversations
that begin in absolute stupidity
and somehow descend
into the subterranean chambers
of the soul.

The sort of person
with whom one can cross
from laughter to confession
without noticing the border.

They have been there
since the beginning.

One of the first players
to sit before my little screen
while I learned how to become
a god of fictional worlds.

And now they know too much.

Which is another word
for trust.

They are entrusted
with secrets,
with silences,
with the uglier specimens
of the heart.

With everything.

Even the steering wheel—

which may, in fact,
be the most terrifying sacrament
of friendship.

There is a particular intimacy
in being known both
at one's most ridiculous
and at one's most ruinous,

and being loved
without requiring either version
to disappear.

And then there is the sweetheart.

The one who has remained
through thick weather
and thin.

She carries storms
that were never hers to deserve.

People have been cruel to her
for reasons as flimsy
as people's cruelty usually is:

because she is too much,
too strange,
too passionate,
too unafraid of her own obsessions.

Perhaps a little übermütig.

Perhaps occasionally
a little too willing
to leap before checking
whether the earth is still there.

But what a beautiful thing—

to possess that much momentum.

To be funny
and fervent
and wonderfully nerdish.

To become obsessed
with something
until it is no longer an interest
but an entire private universe.

She is another soul
I would trust without hesitation.

Not merely with secrets.

Not merely with the heart.

With the soul itself.

And perhaps that is what friendship
has become to me:

not a collection of people,

but a small pantheon
of mortal gods.

One guards pearls.

One forgets his own worth.

One feeds people
while insulting them.

One drives the car
while holding half my secrets.

One carries storms
and somehow still makes jokes.

And all of them—

all of them—

have seen some version of me
that the world might have found
too strange, too loud, too quiet,
too obsessive, too much.

And still they remained.

Not because they promised
never to leave.

Not because friendship is some immaculate
and permanent cathedral.

But because, somehow,
again and again,

we chose the same table.

The same laughter.

The same late-night conversations.

The same ridiculous stories.

The same little universe
we keep building together
from scraps and accidents
and time.

I think there are people
who save lives without knowing it.

Not dramatically.

Not with divine intervention.

Sometimes salvation is merely—

a message answered at 2 a.m.

A passenger in the car.

A meal left on the table.

A campaign survived.

A joke at the correct hour.

A creature entrusted to careful hands.

A conversation that lasts
until the darkness becomes bearable.

No one announces these miracles.

There are no bells.

No halos.

No celestial bureaucracy
recording who kept whom alive.

There are only these small mercies—

the pearl still shining,

the midnight conversation
still refusing to end,

the insult that somehow means affection,

the campaign dragged
through one more catastrophe,

the little scaly sovereign
still waiting to be fed,

the person still driving,

the person still laughing,

the person still showing up
with their strange obsessions
and sharp edges
and impossible tenderness.

Perhaps this is what a pantheon
actually looks like.

Not marble.

Not thunder.

Not immortal figures
watching from above.

Just people.

People who answer.

People who cook.

People who listen.

People who drive.

People who roll the dice
and stay for the aftermath.

People who let you hand them
something small and fragile
and trust them not to drop it.

People who, without ever naming it,
keep leaving the door open.

And perhaps home
was never a place.

Perhaps it is this:

the same table
chosen again and again.

The same chairs
pulled out for one another.

The same voices
returning after midnight.

The same ridiculous little universe
somehow still intact.

Six ordinary lives
interlocking in ways
none of us could have designed—

not a cathedral,

but something stranger.

Something made of repetition.

Of are you home?

Did you eat?

Want to talk?

Roll the dice.

Drive safe.

Look at this.

I'm here.

And perhaps that is enough.

Not salvation.

Not permanence.

Not some immaculate promise
that nobody will ever hurt anyone.

Just this strange accumulation
of ordinary mercies.

A thousand tiny instances
of still here.

Still here.

Still laughing.

Still talking.

Still making dinner.

Still rolling the dice.

Still trusting someone else
with the fragile, ridiculous things.

And if that is not a miracle,

I don't particularly care
what the word means anymore.

I'll take the car ride.

I'll take the stupid joke.

I'll take the midnight confession.

I'll take the pearl.

The knife-edged affection.

The terrible driving.

The nerdish obsession.

The little scaly child
waiting to be fed.

I'll take the table.

I'll take the voices.

I'll take the six impossible,
inconvenient,
beautifully misfit lives
that somehow became
part of the architecture
of mine.

I'll take all of it.

I'll take them—

not as saints,

not as saviours,

not as some immaculate answer
to the question of how to survive,

but as they are:

strange,

brilliant,

difficult,

tender,

ridiculous,

human.

And perhaps that is the miracle—

not that they saved me,

but that, somehow,

we kept becoming
a place for one another
to remain.

The chair remains pulled out.

The food is still warm.

The dice are still waiting.

The gecko is still alive.

Someone is still laughing.

Someone is still answering.

And the door—

the one that never required knocking—

is still open.